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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75293 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
+notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+                             THE WAR DRAMA
+                             OF THE EAGLES
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: PORTE-AIGLE, IMPERIAL GUARD, AND GRENADIER SERGEANT IN
+PARADE UNIFORM.
+
+From St. Hilaire’s _Histoire de la Garde Impériale_.]
+
+
+
+
+                             THE WAR DRAMA
+                             OF THE EAGLES
+
+                   NAPOLEON’S STANDARD-BEARERS ON THE
+                   BATTLEFIELD IN VICTORY AND DEFEAT
+                      FROM AUSTERLITZ TO WATERLOO
+                   A RECORD OF HARD FIGHTING, HEROISM
+                             AND ADVENTURE
+
+                            BY EDWARD FRASER
+
+              AUTHOR OF “THE ENEMY AT TRAFALGAR,” “FAMOUS
+             FIGHTERS OF THE FLEET,” “THE ‘LONDONS,’” ETC.
+
+
+    “These Eagles to you shall ever be your rallying-point. Swear
+    to sacrifice your lives in their defence; to maintain them by
+    your courage ever in the path of victory.”--_On the Day of the
+    Presentation on the Field of Mars._
+
+    “The soldier who loses his Eagle loses his Honour and his All!”
+
+              _Address to the 4th of the Line after Austerlitz._
+
+    “The loss of an Eagle is an affront to the reputation of its
+    regiment for which neither victory nor the glory acquired on a
+    hundred fields can make amends.”
+
+                      _55th Bulletin of the Grand Army_: 1807.
+                                                       NAPOLEON.
+
+
+                      WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
+
+
+                                 LONDON
+                   JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
+                                  1912
+
+
+
+
+                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This book breaks fresh ground in a field of romantic and widespread
+interest; one that should prove attractive, associated as it is with
+the ever-fascinating subject of Napoleon. Incidentally, indeed, it
+may also help to throw a new sidelight on certain characteristics of
+Napoleon as a soldier.
+
+I venture to hope at the same time that it will arouse interest
+further as offering independent testimony to the valour of our own
+soldiers, the Old British Army which, under Wellington, defeated on
+the battlefield the veterans of the Eagles whose feats of heroism and
+hardihood are described in the book. Magnificent as were the acts of
+fine daring and heroic endurance of the men whom Wellington led to
+victory, no less stirring and deserving of admiration were the deeds of
+chivalrous valour and stern fortitude done for the honour of Napoleon’s
+Eagles by the gallant soldiers who faced them and proved indeed foemen
+worthy of their steel. All who hold in regard cool, self-sacrificing
+bravery and steadfast courage in adversity and peril will find no lack
+of instances in the stories of what the warriors of the Eagles dared
+and underwent for the name and fame of the Great Captain.
+
+The record of Napoleon’s Eagles in war has never before been set forth,
+and the centenary year of Badajoz and Salamanca and the Moscow Campaign
+seems to offer a befitting occasion for its appearance.
+
+The world, indeed, is in the midst of a cycle of Napoleonic
+centenaries. Our own centenary memories of Talavera--the victory of
+which Wellington said, in later years, that if his Allies had done
+their part, “it would have been as great a battle as Waterloo”--of
+Busaco ridge and Torres Vedras, of heroic Barrosa and desperate
+Albuhera,--these are only just behind us. Immediately ahead lie the
+centenaries of yet greater events. In less than a twelvemonth hence
+England will mark the centenary of Vittoria, Wellington’s decisive day
+in Spain, the crowning triumph of the Peninsular War; and yet more
+than that in its import and sequel for Europe. It was the news of
+Vittoria that, in July 1813, decided Napoleon’s father-in-law to throw
+Austria’s sword into the balance against the Man of Destiny, compelling
+Napoleon, with what remained of the Grand Army, to stand at bay for the
+“Battle of the Nations” on the Marchfeldt before Leipsic. Within six
+months from then, the world, in like manner, will recall the Farewell
+of Fontainebleau, and Elba; and finally, in the year after that, the
+British Empire will commemorate the epoch-making centenary of the
+greatest of all British triumphs in arms on land--
+
+     “Of that fierce field where last the Eagles swooped,
+      Where our Great Master wielded Britain’s sword,
+      And the Dark Soul the world could not subdue,
+      Bowed to thy fortune, Prince of Waterloo!”
+
+--the triple-event, indeed, of Waterloo, the _Bellerophon_, St. Helena.
+
+The stories told here exist indeed, even in France, only in more or
+less fragmentary form, scattered broadcast amongst the memoirs left
+by the men of the Napoleonic time. They have not before been brought
+together within the covers of a book.
+
+I have utilised, in addition to the personal memoirs of Napoleon’s
+officers, French regimental records, bulletins, and despatches (noted
+in my List of Authorities), other official military documents,
+contemporary newspapers, both British and foreign, and information
+kindly placed at my disposal by the authorities of Chelsea Royal
+Hospital and the Royal United Service Institution, and by friends
+abroad.
+
+                                                      EDWARD FRASER.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+  LIST OF AUTHORITIES                                                 XV
+
+
+  CHAPTER I
+
+  NAPOLEON ADOPTS THE EAGLE OF CAESAR                                  1
+
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  THE DAY OF THE PRESENTATION ON THE FIELD OF MARS                    16
+
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  IN THE FIRST CAMPAIGN:
+
+      UNDER FIRE WITH MARSHAL NEY                                     60
+
+      THE MIDNIGHT BATTLE BY THE DANUBE                               80
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  ON THE FIELD OF AUSTERLITZ                                          96
+
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  IN THE SECOND CAMPAIGN:
+
+      JENA AND THE TRIUMPH OF BERLIN                                 123
+
+      THE TWELVE LOST EAGLES OF EYLAU                                150
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE:
+
+      THE “EAGLE-GUARD”                                              181
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  BEFORE THE ENEMY AT ASPERN AND WAGRAM                              197
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+  “THE EAGLE WITH THE GOLDEN WREATH” IN LONDON                       214
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+  OTHER EAGLES IN ENGLAND FROM BATTLEFIELDS OF SPAIN                 240
+
+
+  CHAPTER X
+
+  IN THE HOUR OF DARKEST DISASTER:
+
+      AFTER MOSCOW: HOW THE EAGLES FACED THEIR FATE                  263
+
+      AT BAY IN NORTHERN GERMANY--1813                               291
+
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+
+  THAT TERRIBLE MIDNIGHT AT THE INVALIDES                            316
+
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+
+  THE EAGLES OF THE LAST ARMY                                        345
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+
+  AT WATERLOO:
+
+      “AVE CAESAR! MORITURI TE SALUTANT!”                            375
+
+      HOW WELLINGTON’S TROPHIES WERE WON                             388
+
+      THE LAST ATTACK AND AFTER: THE EAGLES OF THE GUARD             405
+
+      THE EAGLES ANNOUNCE VICTORY TO LONDON                          424
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIV
+
+  AFTER THE DOWNFALL                                                 432
+
+
+  INDEX                                                              437
+
+
+
+
+                        ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
+
+
+                             ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  PORTE-AIGLE, IMPERIAL GUARD, AND GRENADIER SERGEANT IN PARADE
+      UNIFORM                                             _Frontispiece_
+    From St. Hilaire’s _Histoire de la Garde Impériale_
+
+                                                             FACING PAGE
+  MARSHAL MORTIER                                                     90
+
+  MARSHAL SOULT                                                      104
+    In the uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the Chasseurs of the Guard
+
+  MARSHAL DAVOUT                                                     134
+
+  MARSHAL NEY WITH THE REARGUARD IN THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW          282
+    From a picture by A. Ivon, at Versailles
+    Photo by Alinari
+
+  NAPOLEON AND THE “SACRED SQUADRON” ON THE WAY TO THE BERESINA      288
+    From the picture by H. Bellangé
+
+  NAPOLEON’S FAREWELL TO THE OLD GUARD AT FONTAINEBLEAU              312
+    From a print after H. Vernet, kindly lent by Messrs.
+        T. H. Parker, 45, Whitcomb Street
+
+  THE FIGHT FOR THE STANDARD                                         396
+    Sergeant Ewart of the Scots Greys taking the Eagle of the
+        45th at Waterloo
+    From the picture by R. Andsell, A.R.A., at Royal Hospital,
+        Chelsea
+
+  THE SQUARE OF THE OLD GUARD AT BAY AFTER WATERLOO                  412
+    From the picture by H. Bellangé
+
+  LA REVUE DES MORTS                                                 434
+    From a picture by R. Demoraine
+
+
+                                 MAPS
+
+  OUTLINE MAP OF NAPOLEON’S CONCENTRATION IN REAR OF ULM,
+      SEPTEMBER 27 TO OCTOBER 18, 1805                                82
+
+  SKETCH PLAN OF THE POSITIONS OF THE ARMIES AT THE OPENING OF
+      THE BATTLE OF AUSTERLITZ                                        98
+
+  SKETCH PLAN OF THE BATTLEFIELD OF EYLAU                            154
+
+  PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF BARROSA                                      222
+
+  WATERLOO. THE CHARGE OF THE UNION BRIGADE                          394
+
+  WATERLOO--THE FINAL PHASE. SKETCH PLAN TO SHOW THE ATTACK AND
+      THE DEFEAT OF THE COLUMNS OF THE GUARD                         410
+
+  GENERAL MAP                                                        436
+
+
+
+
+                          LIST OF AUTHORITIES
+
+
+  ALISON: History of Europe.
+
+  AVRILLON, PION DES LOCHES, PELET, COMBES, DU ROURE DE PAULIN,
+      VIONNET, BERTIN, THIRION, NOEL, DUPUY, BLAZE, ST. CHAMANS,
+      VIGÉE-LEBRUN, ETC.: Souvenirs.
+
+  BARBOUX, GENERAL: War Services.
+
+  BARDIN: Dictionnaire de l’Armée. BARDIN: Memorial de l’Officier.
+
+  BEAMISH: The King’s German Legion.
+
+  BEAUVAIS: Victoires des Français, 1792–1815.
+
+  BERTHEZÉNE, GENERAL: Souvenirs Militaires.
+
+  BIGNON: Memoirs of Napoleon’s Campaigns.
+
+  BOUILLÉ: Les Drapeaux Français.
+
+  BOURRIENNE: Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte.
+
+  BUGEAUD, MARSHAL: Memoirs.
+
+  BYRNE, MILES: Memoirs.
+
+  Catalogue:--Heeres Museum--Wien.
+
+  Catalogue:--Real Armeria--Madrid.
+
+  CATHCART, HON. SIR C.: Commentaries--1812–13.
+
+  CAULAINCOURT: Recollections.
+
+  CHAMBRAY: History of the Russian Expedition.
+
+  CHAMPEAUX: Honneur et Patrie.
+
+  CHARBOUCLIÈRE: Dictionnaire de l’Armée.
+
+  CHARRAS: Campagne de 1815.
+
+  CHICHESTER and SHORT: Records and Badges of the British Army.
+
+  COLBORN: United Service Journal (_passim_): Regimental Histories
+      (British and French), etc.
+
+  Correspondance Militaire de Napoléon.
+
+  COTTON: A Voice from Waterloo.
+
+  DALTON: The Waterloo Roll Call.
+
+  Das Zeughaus zu Berlin.
+
+  DAVOUT, MARSHAL: Memoirs.
+
+  DE GONNEVILLE: Souvenirs Militaires.
+
+  DEMMIN: Weapons of War.
+
+  DESJARDINS: Recherches sur les Drapeaux.
+
+  DE SUZANNE, GENERAL: L’Infanterie Française.
+
+  DE SUZANNE, GENERAL: La Cavalerie Française.
+
+  DUCASSE: Visite à l’Hôtel des Invalides.
+
+  DUCOR: Aventures d’un Marin de la Garde.
+
+  DUMAS, M.: Souvenirs Militaires.
+
+  DUMAS, M.: Précis des Evènemens Militaires.
+
+  FANTIN DES ODOARDS, GENERAL: Journal.
+
+  FÉZENSAC: Journal of the Russian Campaign--1812–13.
+
+  FÉZENSAC: Souvenirs Militaires.
+
+  FOY, GENERAL: History of the War in Spain.
+
+  GARDNER, DARSEY: Quatre Bras, Ligny, Waterloo.
+
+  GLEIG: Narrative of the Battle of Leipsic.
+
+  GOURGAUD: Napoleon and the Grand Army in Russia.
+
+  GROSE: Military Antiquities.
+
+  HOME: Précis of Modern Tactics.
+
+  HOOPER: Waterloo: The Downfall of the First Napoleon.
+
+  HOUSSAYE: Napoléon, Homme de Guerre.
+
+  HOUSSAYE: Waterloo.
+
+  JEANNENEY: Le Glorieux Passé d’un Régiment.
+
+  JOMINI: L’Art de Guerre.
+
+  JOMINI: Life of Napoleon I.
+
+  JUNOT, MARSHAL: Memoirs.
+
+  JURIEN DE LA GRAVIÈRE: Guerres Maritimes.
+
+  LABAUME: History of the Campaign in Russia.
+
+  LACROIX, D.: Les Maréchaux de Napoléon.
+
+  LACROIX, D.: Histoire Anecdotique du Drapeau Français.
+
+  LALLEMAND: Les Drapeaux des Invalides--1814.
+
+  LAMARTINE: History of the Restoration.
+
+  LANFREY: History of Napoleon I.
+
+  LA VALETTE: Memoirs.
+
+  LEJEUNE: Memoirs.
+
+  LEMONNIER-DELAFOSSE: Campagnes de 1810–15.
+
+  LYDEN: Nos 144 Régiments de Ligne.
+
+  MACDONALD, MARSHAL: Recollections.
+
+  MACGEORGE: Flags and their History.
+
+  MARBOT: Memoirs.
+
+  MARBOT et DE NOIRMONT: Costumes Militaires Françaises.
+
+  MARMONT, MARSHAL: The Spirit of Military Institutions.
+
+  MASSON: Cavaliers de Napoléon. MASSON: Livre du Sacre de l’Empereur.
+      MASSON: Souvenirs et Recits des Soldats.
+
+  MAXWELL, SIR H.: Life of Wellington. MAXWELL, SIR H.: Victories of
+      the British Armies.
+
+  MAXWELL, W. H.: Peninsular War Sketches.
+
+  Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne.
+
+  MENÉVAL: Memoirs.
+
+  Military Costumes of Europe--1812.
+
+  MILNE: Standards and Colours.
+
+  MORVAN: Le Soldat Impérial.
+
+  NAPIER: History of the Peninsular War.
+
+  Narrative of Captain Coignet.
+
+  NEY, MARSHAL: Memoirs.
+
+  NIOX, GENERAL: Drapeaux et Trophées.
+
+  ODELEBEN: Napoleon’s Campaign in Saxony, 1813.
+
+  [Officially Published] Historiques des Régiments de l’Armée.
+
+  [Officially Published] Publications de la Réunion des Officiers.
+
+  OUDINOT, MARSHAL: Memoirs.
+
+  PARQUIN: Campagnes d’un Vieux Soldat.
+
+  PATTISON: Napoleon’s Marshals.
+
+  PENGUILLY L’HARIDON: Catalogue Musée d’Artillerie.
+
+  Potsdam und seine Umgebung.
+
+  RAPP, GENERAL: Memoirs.
+
+  REY: Histoire du Drapeau.
+
+  ROBERT, COLONEL: Catalogue, Musée d’Artillerie.
+
+  ROSE: Life of Napoleon I.
+
+  ST. HILAIRE: Histoire de la Garde Impériale. ST. HILAIRE: Histoire
+      Populaire de Napoléon I.
+
+  SAVARY: Memoirs.
+
+  SÉGUR: Au Drapeau. SÉGUR: History of the Expedition to Russia. SÉGUR:
+      Memoirs. SÉGUR: Procès Verbal de la Couronnement de Napoléon.
+
+  SERUZIER: Memoirs.
+
+  SHAW KENNEDY, SIR JOHN: Notes on Waterloo.
+
+  SHERER, MOYLE: Tales of the Wars.
+
+  SHOBERL: Narrative of the Battle of Leipsic.
+
+  SIBORNE: Campaign of Waterloo.
+
+  SIBORNE: Waterloo Letters.
+
+  SLOANE: Life of Napoleon I.
+
+  SOULT, MARSHAL: Memoirs.
+
+  SOUTHEY: History of the Peninsular War.
+
+  STENDHAL: Journal and Correspondence.
+
+  STOCQUELER: The British Soldier.
+
+  TAYLOR, SIR HERBERT: Waterloo.
+
+  THIÉBAULT, BARON: Memoirs.
+
+  THIERS: Consulate and Empire.
+
+  WELLINGTON: Despatches.
+
+  WILSON, SIR R.: Narrative of Events in Russia, 1812. WILSON, SIR R.:
+      Private Journal of the Russian Campaign.
+
+  WOOD, SIR EVELYN: Cavalry in the Waterloo Campaign.
+
+
+  (NOTE.--This list is approximately complete, representing about 90
+      per cent. of the total of authorities consulted and laid under
+      contribution.)
+
+
+
+
+                      THE WAR DRAMA OF THE EAGLES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+NAPOLEON ADOPTS THE EAGLE OF CAESAR
+
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor, “by Divine Will and the Constitution
+of the French Republic”--Imperator and hereditary Caesar of the
+Republic--on Friday, May 18, 1804. Three weeks later it was publicly
+announced in the _Moniteur_ that the Eagle had been adopted as the
+heraldic cognisance of the new _régime_ in France.
+
+Its selection for the State armorial bearing of the Empire was one
+of Napoleon’s first acts. That the Roman lictor’s axe and fasces
+surmounted by the red Phrygian cap, with its traditions of revolution,
+which had supplanted the Fleur-de-Lis of the Monarchy, and had served
+as the official badge on the standards of the Republic and the
+Consulate, should continue under the Imperial _régime_, was obviously
+impossible. But what distinctive emblem should be adopted in its stead?
+
+Napoleon had the question debated in his presence at the first _séance_
+of the Imperial Council of State. He had, it would seem, not made up
+his mind in regard to it. At any rate, a few days before the meeting
+of the Council, he had directed a Committee to draw up a statement and
+offer suggestions.
+
+The matter was brought forward at the first meeting of the Imperial
+Council, held at the Château of Saint-Cloud on Tuesday, June 12,
+1804, after a preliminary discussion on the arrangements for the
+Coronation, when and where it should be held, and what was to be the
+form of ceremonial. The Coronation, all agreed at the outset, must
+take place in the current year. Rheims, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Paris, in
+turn, were suggested as suitable places for the ceremony, Paris being
+finally decided on; the scene of the event to be the Champ de Mars.
+Napoleon himself proposed the Champs de Mars, with a threefold ceremony
+there--the taking of the constitutional oath, the actual coronation,
+the presentation of the Emperor to the assembled people. A brief
+discussion followed on the form of the coronation ceremony, whether it
+should be accompanied by religious rites. It was put forward that, as
+Charlemagne had received his authority from the Pope, might not the
+Pope now be induced to visit Paris and personally crown the Emperor?
+Napoleon, intervening in the discussion, made a strong point of the
+necessity of some kind of religious service on the occasion. He did not
+care much, he cynically remarked, what religion was selected; only it
+must be in accordance with the views of the majority of the nation. It
+would be impossible to do without some sort of religious observance. In
+all nations, said he, Ceremonies of State were accompanied by religious
+services. As to asking the Pope to take part, from his point of view,
+at the moment, the attendance of a Papal legate would be preferable.
+If the Pope himself came to Paris, his presence would assuredly tend
+to relegate the Emperor to a secondary position: “Tout le monde me
+laisserait pour courir voir le Pape!” The matter, however, as the
+discussion proceeded, seemed to present so many difficulties, that
+the Council, after declaring themselves generally against having any
+religious ceremony at all, decided to leave the question for further
+consideration.
+
+On that the Council turned to deal with the selection of the heraldic
+insignia and official badge of the Empire.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GALLIC COCK PROPOSED]
+
+Senator Crétet, on behalf of the special Committee appointed by
+Napoleon to prepare a statement for the Council, presented his report.
+The Committee, he said, had decided unanimously to recommend the Cock,
+the historic national emblem of Ancient Gaul, as the most fitting
+cognisance for Imperial France. Should that not find favour with the
+Council, either the Eagle, the Lion, or the Elephant, in the opinion
+of the Committee, might well be adopted. Individual members of the
+Committee, added Crétet, had further suggested the Aegis of Minerva, or
+some flower like the Fleur-de-Lis, an Oak-tree, or an Ear of Corn.
+
+Miot, one of the members of the Council, rose as Crétet sat down, and
+protested against the re-introduction of the Fleur-de-Lis. That, he
+said, was imbecility. He proposed a figure of the Emperor seated on his
+throne as the best possible badge for the French Empire.
+
+He was not seconded, however, and Napoleon interposed abruptly to
+set aside the Committee’s suggestion of reviving the Gallic Cock. He
+dismissed that notion with a contemptuous sneer. “Bah,” he exclaimed,
+“the Cock belongs to the farmyard! It is far too feeble a creature!”
+(“Le Coq est de basse cour. C’est un animal trop faible!”) Napoleon
+spoke rapidly and vivaciously. He had not yet, in those early days,
+acquired the impressive Imperial style that he afterwards affected.
+“His language at these earlier Council meetings was still impregnated
+with his original Jacobin style; he spoke frequently, spontaneously,
+familiarly; monologued at the top of his voice (avec des éclats de
+voix); apostrophised frequently, appearing at times as though overcome
+with nervousness, now almost in tears, now breaking out in a frenzy of
+passion, unrestrainedly emphasising his personal likes and dislikes.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE LION--THE ELEPHANT--THE BEE]
+
+Count Ségur, Imperial Grand Master of the Ceremonies, suggested the
+Lion as the most suitable emblem: “parcequ’il vaincra le Léopard,” he
+explained.
+
+Councillor Laumond proposed the adoption of the Elephant instead; with
+for a motto “_Mole et Mente_.” The Elephant had a great vogue at that
+day among European heraldic authorities as being pre-eminently a royal
+beast. There was a widely prevalent belief, on the authority of old
+writers on natural history, that an Elephant could not be made to bow
+its knees. Further, too, the elephant typified resistless strength as
+well as magnanimity. And had not Caesar himself once placed the effigy
+of the Elephant on the Roman coinage? Nobody else at the Council,
+however, seemed to care for the Elephant.
+
+Councillor Simon objected to Ségur’s proposition, on the score that the
+Lion was essentially an aggressive beast.
+
+Cambacérès, ex-Consul and Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, suggested a
+swarm of Bees as the most suitable national emblem. It would represent
+the actual situation of France, he explained--a republic with a
+presiding chief.
+
+Councillor Lacuèe supported Cambacérès. The Bee, he added, was the
+more suitable, in that it possessed a sting as well as being a maker of
+honey.
+
+Cambacérès remarked that he favoured the idea of the Bee as typifying
+peaceful industry rather than offensive power.
+
+The other members took no interest in the idea of the Bee, and after
+some discursive talk the Council fell back on the Committee’s original
+suggestion of the historic Gallic Cock. The general voice favoured the
+adoption of the Cock, and they unanimously voted for it.
+
+That, however, would not do for Napoleon. He sharply refused once more
+to hear of the Cock in any circumstances. He had for some minutes sat
+silent, listening to the discussion until the vote was taken. On that
+he rose and banned the Cock absolutely and finally.
+
+“The Cock is quite too weak a creature,” he exclaimed. “A thing like
+that cannot possibly be the cognisance of an Empire such as France. You
+must make your choice between the Eagle, the Elephant, and the Lion!”
+
+The Eagle, however, did not commend itself to the Council. That emblem,
+it was pointed out by several members, had been already adopted by
+other European nations. For France, such being the case, the Eagle
+would not be sufficiently distinctive. The German Empire had the Eagle
+for its cognisance. So had Austria. So had Prussia. So had Poland
+even--the White Eagle of the Jagellons. The Council was plainly not
+attracted by the Eagle.
+
+Lebrun, the other ex-Consul, Arch-Treasurer of the Empire, now put in
+a word again for the Fleur-de-Lis. It had been, he said, the national
+emblem of France under all the previous dynasties. The Fleur-de-Lis,
+declared Lebrun, was the real historic emblem of France, and he
+proposed that it should be adopted for the Empire.
+
+Nobody, though, supported him, one member, Councillor Regnaud,
+condemning the idea of the Fleur-de-Lis as utterly out of date. “The
+nation,” added Regnaud, with a sneer, “will neither go back to the cult
+of the Lilies nor to the religion of Rome!”
+
+[Sidenote: “YOU MUST CHOOSE THE LION!”]
+
+At that point Napoleon lost patience. Interposing to close the
+discussion, he curtly bade the Council to cease from wasting time.
+They must decide on the Lion for the Imperial Emblem. His preference
+was for the figure of a Lion, lying over the map of France, with one
+paw stretched out across the Rhine: “Il faut prendre un Lion, s’étendu
+sur la carte de France, la patte prête à dépasser le Rhin.” Napoleon
+proposed in addition, by way of motto, beneath the Lion-figure, these
+defiant words: “_Malheur à qui me cherche!_”
+
+No more was said on the subject after that. The Council submitted
+forthwith to Napoleon’s dictation, and, as it would appear, without
+taking any formal vote, passed to the remaining business of the day:
+the inscription on the new coinage and certain amendments to the
+Criminal Code.
+
+But even then, as it befell, the decision as to the national emblem was
+not conclusive. Napoleon changed his mind about the Lion shortly after
+the Council had broken up. The Lion as the designated cognisance of
+the French Empire did not last twenty-four hours. Napoleon himself, on
+the report of the Council meeting being presented for his signature,
+definitely rejected the Lion. He cancelled his own proposition with a
+stroke of his pen. With his own hand the Emperor struck out the words
+“Lion couchant,” with the reference to the map of France and the Rhine,
+writing over the erasure, “Un Aigle éploye”--an Eagle with extended
+wings. So Napoleon independently settled the matter.
+
+Napoleon, as it would appear, in making his ultimate choice of the
+Eagle, had this in his mind. Charlemagne was ever in his thoughts at
+that time as his own destined exemplar. The Eagle of Charlemagne, it
+was now borne in upon his mind irresistibly, had a pre-eminent claim to
+be recalled and become the national heraldic badge for the new Frankish
+Empire of the West, as having been the traditional emblem of Imperial
+authority in the ancient Frankish Empire, the prototype and historic
+predecessor of the Empire of which he was head. Said Napoleon, indeed,
+in justifying his final adoption of the Eagle: “Elle affirme la dignité
+Impériale et rappelait Charlemagne.”
+
+[Sidenote: WHERE THE ARTIST GOT HIS DESIGN]
+
+A commission to design the new Imperial Eagle “after that of
+Charlemagne” was forthwith given to Isabey (the elder Isabey--Jean
+Baptiste), “Peintre et Dessinateur du Cabinet de l’Empereur,” whose
+reputation was at that moment at its zenith. The artist, however,
+had no Carlovingian model to draw from, and nobody, it would appear,
+could give him any advice. He had to depict “Un Aigle éployé”--a
+Spread-Eagle. Discarding heraldic conventionalism, he produced the
+Napoleonic Eagle of history; an Eagle _au naturel_, shown in the act of
+taking wing. The idea of it Isabey took from a sketch he himself had
+made nine years before, in the Monastery of the Certosa of Milan, of an
+eagle sculptured on one of the tombs of the Visconti.
+
+Following on his adoption of the Eagle for the cognisance of the Empire
+at large, Napoleon announced that the Eagle would in future be the
+battle-standard of the Army. He had, though, as to that Eagle, yet
+another thought in his mind. For his soldiers he desired the French
+Eagle to represent the military standard of Ancient Rome, the historic
+emblem of Caesar’s legionaries, with its resplendent traditions of
+world-wide victory. That intention, furthermore, Napoleon went out
+of his way to emphasise significantly through the place and moment
+that he chose for the promulgation of the Army Order appointing the
+Eagle of the Caesars as the battle-standard of the French Empire. The
+Imperial rescript was dated from the Camp of the “Army of the Ocean” at
+Boulogne; from amidst the vast array of soldiers mustered there for the
+threatened invasion of England.
+
+At the same time Isabey’s design for one Eagle would suffice as a
+model for the other. It sufficiently suggested the Roman type. Like
+Charlemagne, had not Napoleon led his army across the Alps? like
+Caesar, was he not about to lead it across the Straits?
+
+“The Eagle with wings outspread, as on the Imperial Seal, will be
+at the head of the standard-staves, as was the practice in the
+Roman army--(_placée au sommet du bâton, telle que la portaient les
+Romains_). The flag will be attached at the same distance beneath
+the Eagle, as was the Labarum.” So Napoleon wrote in his preliminary
+instructions from Boulogne to Marshal Berthier, Head of the Etat-Major
+of the “Army of England,” at that moment on duty at the War Office in
+Paris.
+
+The Eagle, Napoleon directed, was of itself to constitute the standard:
+“_Essentiellement constituer l’étendard_,” were Napoleon’s words. He
+set a secondary value on the flag which the Eagle surmounted. The flag
+to Napoleon was a subsidiary adjunct.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FLAG OF MINOR ACCOUNT]
+
+Flags, of course, would come and go. They could be renewed, he wrote,
+as might be necessary, at any time; every two years, or oftener. The
+Eagle, on the other hand, was to be a permanency. It was to be for
+all time the standard of its corps: also, to add still further to its
+sacrosanct nature and _éclat_, every Eagle would be received only from
+the hands of the Emperor.[1]
+
+Every Battalion of Foot and Squadron of Horse was to have its Eagle,
+which, on parade and before the enemy under fire, would be in the
+special charge of the battalion or squadron sergeant-major, with
+an escort of picked veteran soldiers; “men who had distinguished
+themselves on the battlefield in at least two combats.”
+
+Exceptional care, Napoleon laid down, was to be taken by regimental
+commanders that no harm should befall the Eagle. In the event of
+accident happening to it, a special report was to be made direct to
+the Emperor. Should it unfortunately happen that the Eagle was lost in
+battle, the regiment concerned would have to prove to the Emperor’s
+satisfaction that there had been no default. No new Eagle would be
+granted in place of one lost until the regiment in question had atoned
+for the slur on its character by either achieving “_éclatante_”
+distinction in the field, by some exceptionally brilliant feat of arms,
+or by presenting the Emperor with an enemy’s standard “taken by its own
+valour.”
+
+The silken tricolor flag, as has been said, was in the eyes of Napoleon
+of subordinate account. It was to be considered merely as a set-off
+to the Eagle, as merely “_l’ornement de l’Aigle_.” The Eagle, and the
+Eagle only, must be the object of the soldier’s devotion. Napoleon
+paid little regard to the flag, beyond as being of use for displaying
+the record of a regiment’s war career. He would have liked indeed, as
+it would seem, to substitute another flag altogether, and went so far
+as to have designs for a green regimental flag submitted to him.[2]
+Prudence, however, forbade its introduction, and directions were
+issued that the general pattern of tricolor standard in use under the
+Consulate should be retained, with minor alterations of detail in the
+design rendered necessary in consequence of the new constitution of the
+State.
+
+[Sidenote: THE LEGEND ON THE FLAG]
+
+The regimental flags would consist of a white diamond-shaped centre,
+with the corners of the flag alternately red and blue; according to the
+pattern authorised two years previously by Napoleon as First Consul.
+Thus the national colours would continue to be represented. For the
+Infantry, in the centre of each flag would be, on one side, the words
+“Empire Français,” with the legend, inscribed in letters of gold,
+“L’Empereur des Français au --^e Régiment d’Infanterie de Ligne,” which
+would take the place of the Republican inscription hitherto borne
+there; the number of each corps being inscribed in the blank space and
+in a laurel chaplet embroidered at each corner of the flag. For Cavalry
+the inscription ran: “L’Empereur des Français au --^e Cuirassiers,” or
+“au --^e Chasseurs”; and so on for other corps, Artillery, Dragoons,
+and Hussars.
+
+On the reverse, for corps of all arms, with the exception of the Guard,
+was emblazoned the motto “Valeur et Discipline,” and beneath it the
+number of the battalion or squadron in each regiment.
+
+Below the numbers was added any Inscription of Honour which had been
+granted to the corps, such as, in the case of one regiment, “Le 15^e
+est couvert de la Gloire”; in the case of another, “Le Terrible 57^e
+qui rien n’arrête”; with others, “Le Bon et Brave 28^e”; “Le 75^e
+arrive et bât l’Ennemi”; “J’étais tranquille, le brave 32^e était là”;
+“Il n’est pas possible d’être plus brave que le 63^e”; “Brave 18^e, je
+vous connais. L’Ennemi ne tiendra pas devant vous”; and so on. These
+were mostly quotations from “mentions in despatches” made by Napoleon
+in regard to regiments in his famous “Army of Italy,” authorised by
+him, at first of his own initiative, and later as First Consul, to be
+recorded as Inscriptions of Honour on the regimental colours. The flags
+of other corps bore names of victories of note in which the regiments
+had taken part; as, for instance, “Rivoli,” “Lodi,” “Marengo.”[3]
+
+[Sidenote: PROPOSED FOR CORONATION DAY]
+
+Napoleon overlooked nothing that might add to the prestige of his
+Eagles. Not only would he himself personally present its Eagle to
+each regiment, but, further, there would be at the outset a general
+presentation of Eagles in Paris to the whole Army, which would be
+made a State event of significance, and form an integral part of
+the ceremony of his Coronation. On that Napoleon had insisted, in
+reply to a technical legal objection raised at one of the meetings
+of the Council of State. It was not to be a Parisian popular show.
+He was ready, indeed, he said, to transfer the ceremony to Boulogne.
+“Je rassemblerais deux cent mille hommes au camp. Là j’aurais une
+population couverte des blessures dont je serais sûr!” He gave
+directions that the Presentation of the Eagles should take place on the
+Field of Mars in front of the Military School, on the same day as the
+Coronation, and should follow immediately after the religious service
+and his actual crowning and consecration by the Pope in Notre Dame.[4]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE DAY OF THE PRESENTATION ON THE FIELD OF MARS
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DAY FINALLY FIXED]
+
+The Coronation, Napoleon first proposed, should take place in the
+Chapel of the Invalides, on the historic day of the 18th Brumaire
+(November 9). Directly after it he would proceed in Imperial State,
+wearing his crown and robes, to the Field of Mars--the Champ de Mars,
+in front of the Military School, a stone’s-throw away--there to
+administer the Military Oath of Allegiance to the Army and distribute
+the Eagles at a grand review to be attended by representative
+deputations from every regiment of the Army from all over the Empire,
+assembled in Paris for the occasion. It was found preferable, however,
+that the Coronation service should take place in the Cathedral of
+Notre Dame instead of at the Invalides; and at a later date. Still,
+however, Napoleon held to his first idea of proceeding direct from
+the Coronation ceremony to the Field of Mars. He insisted that
+the presentation of the Eagles should follow as a joint ceremony
+immediately after his own consecration service. But there was Josephine
+to be considered. She was to accompany Napoleon throughout. The
+Empress, for her part, on hearing what was intended, declared herself
+physically incapable of bearing the strain of the double ceremony, and,
+in the result, Napoleon changed his original purpose at the eleventh
+hour. He consented to put off the presentation of the Eagles until the
+following morning. That plan, in turn, had to be altered. On the very
+afternoon of the Coronation, on his return to the Tuileries from Notre
+Dame, Napoleon found himself compelled, in consequence of the Empress’s
+state of nervous prostration after the fatiguing Cathedral service,
+again to defer the ceremony of the presentation of the Eagles. The
+Emperor now fixed the following Wednesday, December 5, for the “_Fête
+des Aigles_,” as the Army spoke of it--three days from then. There was
+no further putting off after that.
+
+The plans for the muster were drawn up on a grandiose and elaborate
+scale. They provided for an immense attendance under arms of, according
+to one account, eighty thousand men; to comprise the Imperial Guard,
+and the garrison of Paris, together with special detachments sent to
+Paris as representative deputations by every regiment and corps of
+the Army, from all over the Empire. Over a thousand Eagles altogether
+were to be presented: two hundred and eighty to cavalry regiments; six
+hundred odd to infantry, artillery, and special corps; between forty
+and fifty to the Navy (one for the crew of every ship of the Line in
+commission); besides a hundred and eight to the departmental legions of
+the National Guard, the constitutional militia of Revolutionary France,
+which Napoleon, for reasons of policy, could not pass over. Every
+infantry battalion and cavalry squadron, and brigade (or battery) of
+artillery was to have its Eagle.
+
+Each infantry deputation, from both the Imperial Guard and the Line,
+would comprise the colonel or regimental commander, four other
+officers, and ten sous-officiers and men from each of the three
+battalions that at that period made up a French regiment of Foot. In
+all, in addition to the regiments of the Imperial Guard, one hundred
+and twelve regiments of the Line were to be represented, together with
+thirty-one of Light Infantry, twelve of Grenadiers, and one of foreign
+infantry. A deputation of fifteen officers and men was to represent
+each of the hundred and odd cavalry regiments of the Guard and Line;
+and smaller individual detachments would represent the various other
+arms and branches of the service appointed to receive Eagles. They
+would all pass before the Emperor and receive their Eagles from him
+personally, on behalf of their absent comrades, the six hundred
+thousand men who at that moment constituted the active field army of
+France. From every French ship of the Line in commission there would
+in like manner attend ten officers and men.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WHOLE ARMY REPRESENTED]
+
+From far and near the detachments of soldiers and sailors converged
+on the capital, marching some of them hundreds of miles from the most
+distant frontier garrisons of the Empire, and being several weeks on
+the road. The deputations of the First Army Corps, for instance, part
+of which was stationed in Hanover, set off early in October; some of
+its soldiers, quartered by the Elbe, and with from four to five hundred
+miles of road before them, started in the last week of September. The
+detachments from Italy and the Venetian frontier, for another instance,
+the deputations from the 1st of the Line, the 10th, the 52nd, and 101st
+of the Verona garrison, had over eight hundred miles to go, and started
+early in September. Quite an army, indeed, was on the move along the
+highways of France during October and November; all heading for Paris,
+marching by day and being billeted in the towns and villages by night.
+A huge series of detachments came from the camp of the “Army of the
+Ocean” at Boulogne assembled for the invasion of England. Marshal
+Soult, the Commander-in-Chief at Boulogne, with Marshals Davout and
+Ney, preceded them, Admiral Bruix, in charge of the Boulogne “Invasion
+Flotilla” of gunboats and transports, accompanying Soult. The troops
+in Holland; the garrisons of the Rhine fortresses, such as Mayence
+and Strasburg, and of Metz; that of Bayonne on the Spanish frontier;
+troops at every place of arms and cantonment and regimental dépôt all
+over France--all sent their deputations; also every outlying camp,
+every naval port along the coast, from the Texel and Antwerp, Brest,
+Rochfort, and L’Orient round to Toulon, in the south.
+
+Orders were given in every case that the detachments were each to bring
+the existing regimental colours, which, it was understood, were to be
+given up on parade in exchange for the Eagles.
+
+A roomy expanse of level ground several acres in extent, an
+oblong-shaped area nearly three-quarters of a mile in length and six
+hundred yards across, the Field of Mars offered an ideal place for a
+showy military spectacle. Thousands of people could look on comfortably
+at the display from the turfed slopes of the twenty-feet-high
+embankment which skirted the Field of Mars on three sides, and had
+been fitted up by the municipality with rows of seats in closely set
+tiers. As many as three hundred thousand spectators, indeed, could on
+occasion be accommodated there. The fourth side of the Champ de Mars
+was bounded by the _façade_ of the Ecole Militaire--three great domed
+blocks of buildings connected together and affording a grand view of
+the scene for hundreds of privileged guests. The entire frontage of
+the Military School to the height of the first-floor windows was
+taken up for the Day of the Eagles parade by an immense grand-stand,
+constructed to form a series of pavilions for the accommodation of the
+great official personages invited; with, in the centre, in front of the
+lofty colonnaded portico, a magnificently decorated Imperial Pavilion,
+whence Napoleon and Josephine seated on their thrones would look on and
+receive the homage of the Army.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WEATHER ON THAT MORNING]
+
+The only thing that was unpropitious was the weather. It proved, as
+far as the weather went, an unfortunate change of date. The day of the
+Coronation, December 2--it was, by the way, Advent Sunday--had been
+cold and trying, with lowering clouds overhead, but dry. On the Monday,
+Napoleon’s second choice, it was much the same out of doors; and on
+the Tuesday the weather kept fair. Then, however, it changed. During
+Tuesday afternoon the glass began to go down ominously and a chilly
+wind from the south-east set in. Towards ten at night rain and sleet in
+incessant showers began to fall--typical Frimaire weather, in keeping
+with the character of the “sleety month.” “When it did not rain,” says
+somebody, “it snowed, and between whiles it rained and snowed at the
+same time.” That was what the weather was like when Wednesday morning
+broke; but in spite of it the Imperial programme was to be carried out
+in its entirety, and hundreds of thousands of intending spectators
+braved the discomfort and started early to get a good place for
+witnessing the historic display.
+
+All Paris turned out early, prepared to sit out the day from eight in
+the morning until probably after four in the afternoon, packed in dense
+masses round the Champ de Mars.
+
+The heavy firing of salvos of artillery soon after dawn, from a dozen
+points all over Paris, ushered in the day’s doings. The whole city was
+already, as has been said, astir and in the streets, making its way
+to the Champ de Mars. Everywhere dark columns of cloaked soldiers,
+horse and foot, artillerymen without their guns, were tramping along
+through the slush and mud for their posts; some to take part on the
+route of the procession, which was to start from the Tuileries; most
+of them bound for the Field of Mars. Along the streets to be passed by
+the Imperial procession the houses were gaily decked out with festoons
+and branches of evergreens, or with coloured hangings and drapings.
+Oriental rugs of gorgeous hues and patterns, hired or borrowed for the
+Coronation week, hung from most of the windows; they were the favourite
+form of decoration. Here and there flags were seen, but it was not the
+fashion in Paris at that day to fly flags largely on days of public
+rejoicing.
+
+At ten o’clock the cannon again thundered out an Imperial salute--a
+hundred and one guns. All knew what that was for, and there was a hush
+of expectation all over Paris. The guns meant that the Emperor had
+started; that the Imperial State procession had left the Tuileries.
+At that moment the chilly drizzle of sleet was still coming down, but
+the universal enthusiasm rose superior to the wet and cold. No weather
+could damp the anticipations of the excited Parisians over the Imperial
+spectacle.
+
+[Sidenote: MURAT COMMANDS THE PARADE]
+
+On the Champ de Mars, as the guns began to fire, the soldiers--all long
+since in their places drawn up in closely massed columns, that ranged
+right round the parade ground on three sides--stripped off and rolled
+up their soaked cloaks, fixed bayonets, and stood to arms. Murat,
+Governor of Paris, Commander-in-Chief on the parade, took post in
+front of the Imperial Pavilion before the Ecole Militaire: a gorgeous
+figure in a bright blue velvet uniform coat, resplendently embroidered
+with gold, a lilac sash with crimson stripes round his waist; in
+scarlet breeches braided with gold, purple leather Hessians, trimmed
+and tasselled with gold, with gleaming gold spurs and sabre-scabbard;
+wearing a Marshal’s cocked hat with crimson ostrich-plumes, and mounted
+on a no less splendidly caparisoned charger, with leopard-skin and
+crimson and gold saddle-trappings. A brilliant _entourage_ of staff
+officers and dandy aides de camp, daintily attired in pearl-grey
+uniforms, with silver lace, or in crimson and green and gold, clustered
+in rear of their chief.
+
+Simultaneously, the massed bands of the Imperial Guard, who had been
+playing national airs and popular music at times during the past hour,
+formed to the front near by.
+
+For the time being, until after the Emperor should arrive and take
+his seat on the throne, the troops on parade, comprising the Army
+deputations to receive the Eagles, remained as they had been marshalled
+on arrival; arranged in a vast fan-shaped formation round three sides
+of the Champ de Mars. The entire Imperial Army of Napoleon stood
+represented within that space: Imperial Guard, and Line, Cavalry and
+Artillery; the sailors of the Navy; the National Guard,--the _mise en
+scène_ presenting a tremendous impression of martial power, as all
+stood formed up in close order, in their full-dress review-uniforms,
+muskets held stiffly at the support, bayonets fixed.
+
+The Imperial procession set off in full State, accompanied by much the
+same display of martial pomp that had attended the great Coronation
+progress to Notre Dame of three days before. It moved off in a pelting
+squall of sleet; but, almost immediately afterwards, as though Heaven
+would fain spare the show, within a few minutes of the start, the sleet
+and rain ceased and the weather unexpectedly improved.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MAMELUKES LEAD THE WAY]
+
+Foremost of all, the mounted Mamelukes of the Guard came prancing by,
+radiant in Oriental garb, their curved scimitars drawn and gleaming;
+a hundred swarthy figures in scarlet calpacks swathed round with
+white turbans, garbed in vivid green burnous-cloaks well thrown back
+to display gold-embroidered scarlet jackets, bright straw-coloured
+sashes, and baggy scarlet trousers. Their famous Horse-tail Standard
+headed the squadron. Eight hundred stalwart troopers of Napoleon’s pet
+regiment, the corps whose uniform he always wore in camp, the Chasseurs
+of the Guard, followed immediately after the Mamelukes. An ideal _corps
+d’élite_ they looked as they rode by, in their bristling busbies of
+dark fur topped with waving crimson and green plumes, dark green
+double-breasted jackets, and crimson breeches; with crimson pelisses
+hanging at the shoulder, fur-trimmed and barred with yellow braid in
+hussar style. These two corps led the van of the procession.
+
+The first set of Imperial coaches, with six horses each and outriders,
+thereupon came by. They carried mostly State magnificos and grandees
+of exalted position at Court. Coach after coach went slowly past at a
+dignified pace: eight--nine--ten--eleven--conveyances, all spick and
+span with new gilding and varnish. The twelfth coach, beside which
+rode a bevy of smart equerries, held the Princesses of the Bonaparte
+family: five grown-up ladies and the little daughter of Princess Louis.
+It was rather a tight squeeze, for the five Imperial Highnesses were
+plump and bulky persons, and had to be wedged closely; they brought
+with them too, each lady, several yards of train, brocaded stuff with
+stiff edging of gilt-gimp, and thick purple and emerald green velvet
+mantling, which had all to be got in and kept from crumpling as much
+as possible! What they said to one another has not been recorded--they
+were usually free-spoken women with comments for most things ready to
+their tongues, like other daughters of the Revolution. At any rate this
+is known. They were in white silk dresses, low necked, and, in spite of
+their close packing, shivered with the cold, which they felt bitterly.
+“We were all,” related a Lady of Honour elsewhere in the procession,
+“thinly dressed, as for a heated ball-room, and had only thin Cashmere
+shawls to keep our shoulders warm with.”
+
+Then came more soldiers. The immediate escort of the Emperor now
+appeared. Sitting erect and stiff in their saddles, the Carabiniers
+rode up--the senior cavalry regiment of France--eight hundred picked
+horsemen uniformed in Imperial blue and crimson and gold, with helmets
+of burnished brass, over which nodded thick tufted crests of crimson
+wool. The officers, superb beings adorned with breastplates of gleaming
+brass, led the regiment. The Carabiniers claimed to be the only corps
+of the Napoleonic Army which could prove continuity with the Old Royal
+Army, if not indeed with the historic “Maison du Roi” itself, the
+Household Brigade of the Monarchy, owing to a curious oversight at the
+Revolution through which the regiment had escaped dispersal.
+
+Then came the Man of the Hour.
+
+[Sidenote: THE IMPERIAL COACH APPEARS]
+
+Napoleon now appeared, in his brand-new Imperial State coach. Eight
+noble bays drew it--with harness and trappings of red morocco leather
+studded with golden bees. A marvellous vehicle to look at was
+Napoleon’s coach, gleaming all over with gilded carved work; its roof
+topped by a great golden crown, modelled “after that of Charlemagne,”
+as people told one another, upheld by four glistening gilded eagles.
+The State coach sparkled all over, looking as if encrusted with
+gold; a gleaming mass of carved and gilded decorations, representing
+allegorical emblems, heraldic designs, and coats of arms in colour.
+
+Napoleon’s head coachman of the Consulate days, César, sat on the box,
+his fat form embedded in the centre of a luxurious hammer-cloth of
+scarlet velvet, spangled over with golden bees. Outriders in green and
+gold and walking footmen beside the horses added their part; also half
+a score of Pages of Honour, hanging on all round at the sides and back
+of the coach, in green velvet coats, gold laced down the seams, with
+green silk shoulder-knots, scarlet silk breeches and stockings, and
+white ostrich-plumes in their jaunty black velvet hats: most of the
+lads future officers of the Guard. At either side rode Equerries and
+_Officiers d’Ordonnance_, in white and gold or pale blue and silver.
+
+To the crowds that lined the streets the State coach was a sight of the
+day--the coach, for some, as much as the Emperor. All Paris, of course,
+had not been able to find room round the Field of Mars, spacious as
+the accommodation there was. The pavements all along the streets from
+the Tuileries were packed with a dense crowd, which pressed everywhere
+close up behind the double rows of Gendarmes and Imperial Guardsmen
+keeping the processional route.
+
+They shouted “Vive l’Empereur!” lustily, for all had a good view of
+Napoleon through the great glass windows of the coach; seated inside
+on the right, wearing his ostrich-feathered cap of semi-State, a gold
+embroidered purple velvet mantle, and the Grand Master’s collar of the
+Legion of Honour, sparkling with costly gems.
+
+Josephine, a slender figure in ermine cloak and white silk dress,
+sat on Napoleon’s left, and on the front seats sat Joseph and Louis,
+side by side--the elder brother sleek and smiling, wrapped up in
+a poppy-red cloak as Grand Elector of the Empire; Louis Bonaparte
+wearing his blue velvet Constable’s mantle over the brass breastplate
+of the Colonel-in-Chief of the Carabiniers, to which rank Napoleon
+had specially promoted Louis, with the idea of maintaining an old
+tradition of the Monarchy that the titular Commander of the Carabiniers
+should always be a Prince of the Blood, “_Frère du Roi_.”
+
+[Sidenote: CHIEFS OF THE “MAISON MILITAIRE”]
+
+Napoleon’s Imperial Standard was borne immediately after the State
+coach; a crowned eagle heading the staff; the flag a silken tricolor,
+richly fringed with gold and bespangled with golden bees.
+
+Four of the Marshals, readily recognised by their scarlet
+ostrich-plumes and gold-tipped bâtons of command, attended the
+Standard, and, as Colonels-General of the Imperial Guard, led the
+Imperial Military Household, the “Maison Militaire de l’Empereur.”
+The four were: Davout, titular chief of the Grenadiers of the
+Guard; Soult, Colonel-General of the Chasseurs; Bessières, of the
+Heavy Cavalry; Mortier, of the Guard Artillery. Close behind them
+four other gorgeously brilliant officers of rank rode abreast,
+the Colonels-General of the Cavalry of the Army: St. Cyr, of the
+Cuirassiers, disdainful and sardonic of mien; stern Baraguay
+d’Hilliers, of the Dragoons; good-looking Junot, Colonel-General of the
+Hussars; and Napoleon’s son-in-law, the chivalrous Eugène Beauharnais,
+Colonel-General of Chasseurs. A brilliant cavalcade of little less
+resplendent cavaliers, the Emperor’s aides de camp, all of them
+Generals of Division or Brigadiers, rounded up the group.
+
+Another eye-surfeit of gleaming varnish, gilded carvings, and green
+liveries continued the pageant: twelve other State coaches, six-horsed
+like those in advance; carrying the personal suites of Napoleon
+and Josephine and the Princesses, Court Chamberlains and similar
+gold-embroidered functionaries, Ladies of the Palace and “Officers of
+the Crown.” The procession ended after them; the rear being brought
+up by the Mounted Grenadiers of the Guard, strapping troopers in
+huge bear-skins--soldiers picked for their height and bearing from
+the Cavalry of the Line--and the Gendarmerie d’Elite, who formed the
+Imperial palace-guard.
+
+More than half the Imperial Guard--numbering, in 1804, ten thousand
+officers and men--lined the streets under arms; detachments of
+Grenadiers and Vélites, Foot-Chasseurs, Veterans of the Guard, Marines
+of the Guard. Through double rows of these, all standing with presented
+arms, the procession took its way, passing from the Tuileries Gardens,
+across the Place de Concorde and over the bridge there, to the
+Esplanade des Invalides. Yet another thundering Imperial salute from
+the twenty old cannons of the Batterie Triomphale greeted Napoleon at
+that point; while rows of old soldiers, the maimed veterans of Arcola
+and Rivoli and Marengo, shouted themselves hoarse, standing ranged in
+front of the Outer Court beside Napoleon’s Venetian trophy, kept there
+temporarily, the Lion of St. Mark.
+
+From the Invalides, by way of the Rue de Grenelle, it was not far to
+the Military School.
+
+[Sidenote: WITHIN THE MILITARY SCHOOL]
+
+Withindoors at the Ecole Militaire a pause was made in the Governor’s
+apartments, which had been sumptuously furnished for the occasion from
+the Imperial storerooms of the _Garde Meuble_. Napoleon here accepted a
+number of selected addresses from the military delegations. One of them
+was brought by the regimental deputation of the 4th Chasseurs stationed
+at Boulogne. It thanked the Emperor in advance for the new standard he
+was presenting to the corps, “trusting that the day is at hand when we
+shall be able to contribute towards consolidating the splendour of the
+Empire by planting our Eagle on the Tower of London.” The Emperor also
+received the congratulations of the Ambassadors and Diplomatic Corps.
+Ten hereditary German Princes of the Rhineland, visiting Paris for the
+Coronation, attended at the Military School to witness the Presentation
+of the Eagles; at their head the Prince-Bishop-Elector of Ratisbon,
+Arch-Chancellor of the German Empire, the Margrave of Baden, and the
+Princes of Hesse-Darmstadt and Hesse-Homburg. Napoleon and Josephine
+after that withdrew to assume their crowns and Imperial regalia and
+pass outside to the two thrones prepared for them and standing side by
+side in the grand central pavilion in front.
+
+The vast array of “guests of the Emperor,” seated outside, had of
+course been long since in their places, awaiting the advent of their
+Majesties amid surroundings designed on a scale of lavish magnificence
+regardless of cost.
+
+On either hand pavilions and galleries and platforms, canopied and
+carpeted, draped and curtained and hung in crimson and gold, decorated
+with festoons and banners, and fenced with gilded balustrading, covered
+the whole length of the _façade_ of the Ecole Militaire fronting the
+parade ground. In the centre stood the Imperial Pavilion, beneath
+a canopy of crimson silk supported by tall gilded columns. Side
+galleries draped, and under awnings led from it right and left to two
+other pavilions, at either end of the _façade_, similarly adorned in
+lavish gorgeousness. Below the galleries extended long stands, sloping
+forward to the ground, draped in green and crimson, and packed with
+rows of seats five or six deep. Here, partly in the open, sat the
+provincial Coronation guests from the Departments: the local prefects
+and sub-prefects, procurators, magistrates and syndics, mayors and
+councillors, and other municipal functionaries, all in gala-day attire
+of every colour, plumes in their hats, and buttons and embroidery all
+over their coats. They made a many-hued show in the mass, seen from
+the parade ground. The higher State dignitaries had seats under the
+canopies of the galleries, and looked yet more decorative. Seated in
+the pavilions on cushioned chairs were the Ambassadors and Foreign
+Princes, the Senate, Corps Legislatif, and Tribunate, High Court
+Judges in flowing robes of flame-coloured silk, and velvet-clad “Grand
+Officers of the Empire,” in full-dress all. They looked imposing and
+magnificent, but most of them were shivering, with damp bodies and
+numbed fingers.
+
+[Sidenote: IN THE IMPERIAL PAVILION]
+
+The sleet had stopped for the time, but after the all-night’s downpour
+of rain and snow the seats everywhere were in a sad condition. Canopies
+and cushions, curtains, seats, carpets--everything had been drenched
+through and swamped during the night. The discomfort, however, was past
+helping and had to be borne. The Imperial Pavilion itself indeed had
+not escaped a wetting, and in parts it was in little better condition
+than the other places. “Only with the greatest diligence,” describes
+one of the suite, “had it been possible to keep the thrones dry.”
+
+Napoleon’s throne, with beside it the throne for Josephine, at a
+slightly lower elevation, stood at the front of the Imperial Pavilion.
+A gilt-framed crimson velvet Chair of State was provided for the
+Emperor, with a crowned eagle in gilt stucco perched on the back; made
+on the model of Dagobert’s chair on which Napoleon had sat during the
+ceremony of the distribution of the Crosses of the Legion of Honour at
+Boulogne. As on that day, so now, trophies of captured battle-flags
+adorned the back of the Imperial daïs, selected from the two hundred
+and odd standards taken in battle by the Armies of Italy and Egypt
+which Napoleon had led in person: trophies of Montenotte and Arcola,
+of Tagliamento and Lodi, of Rivoli and Castiglione; the red-and-white
+banner of the Knights of Malta; the green Horse-tail Standard of the
+Beys of Egypt; Austrian standards won by Napoleon at the crowning
+triumph of Marengo.
+
+To right and left of the Emperor, on richly decorated chairs of
+ceremony, Joseph and Louis Bonaparte and the Princesses were seated.
+The Imperial suites in attendance were grouped at the back together
+with a cluster of court grandees, filling most of the spacious platform
+behind the throne.
+
+In the forefront, at the Emperor’s right hand, stood a splendid galaxy
+of stalwart figures--the Marshals of the Empire. They stood forward
+prominently. For them that was the day of days. All must see on such
+a day the champion warriors of France, the renown of whose victories
+had filled the world! The whole eighteen were there--all except one.
+Marshal Brune alone was absent; on service out of France as Napoleon’s
+Ambassador at Constantinople. The group was completed by the four
+“Honorary Marshals”--the veteran Kellermann, the victor of Valmy;
+Perignon; Serrurier; and Lefebvre.
+
+[Sidenote: THE LIEUTENANTS OF THE WAR LORD]
+
+Glance for one moment round the main group of thirteen, the chosen
+lieutenants of Napoleon the War Lord, as they stand beside their Chief,
+with, arrayed in front, the serried columns of the destined victors of
+Austerlitz. Next to the Emperor and the Eagles it is they who on this
+Day of the Eagles are the principal objects of interest to the general
+spectator.
+
+Let the reader for one moment imagine himself on the Imperial Pavilion,
+with at his side a convenient friend who knows everybody, to point the
+marshals out.
+
+That short, spare, low-browed, swarthy, Italian-faced man, with crafty,
+pitiless eyes, is Masséna--“L’Enfant chéri de la Victoire,” as Napoleon
+himself hailed him on the battlefield; the very ablest undoubtedly of
+all the Marshals. He knows it too. When the list of the Marshals first
+came out, a friend called on Masséna to know if it was true that he
+was one, and to congratulate him. “Oh yes, thank you,” replied Masséna
+in an icy tone, puckering up his dark face with a sour look, “I am
+one; _one of fourteen_!” He’s Italian in blood and breeding, and in
+his tricky ways; every point about him: but he’d give his soul to be a
+Frenchman! “Massène” is what he is always trying to get people to call
+him. And the airs and self-importance he assumes--though only like most
+of the others in that, indeed--ever since he became “Monseigneur le
+Maréchal” and has had the honour of being addressed as “Mon Cousin”
+by the Emperor! Just think of it! In the old days, behind the counter
+of that little olive-oil and dried-fruit shop up a narrow, smelly back
+street at Antibes, plain “Citoyen André” was good enough! Just look at
+that thin, pouting chest, gleaming all over with gold embroidery, with
+the broad crimson riband of the Legion of Honour slanting across it,
+and the aggressive tilt of his ostrich-plumed hat! Imagine all that
+being once upon a time just a cabin-boy on a Marseilles to Leghorn
+coaster, half-starved and sworn at and cuffed and kicked about by a
+curmudgeonly _padrone_! Then fancy it a sneaking smuggler, chevied
+about, and crouching along to keep out of carbine shot of the Nice
+_douaniers_! After that Sergeant Masséna of the late King’s _Royal
+Italien_ regiment of the Line! And so to the bâton.
+
+They are most of them rather _tête montée_ just now, with their
+exaltation spick and span on them, these demi-gods of war of ours! Just
+see them in the field, or on the march; away from the Emperor. They
+stalk ahead in solitary grandeur; each with his own _pas seul_, keeping
+the lesser creation at arms’ length, wrapped up in his own dignified
+importance. Yet only six months since their lofty Excellencies were
+mere generals of division, “Citoyen Général” this or that, each one;
+just units among a hundred and twenty odd others! Nowadays, on the
+march, your Marshal rides by himself, forty yards ahead of everybody;
+his staff have to tail off well in rear and keep back! M. le Maréchal
+doesn’t deign to open his lips, except to give an order. He lives by
+himself: nobody now is good enough to ask to dinner, except perhaps
+another marshal! No off-duty pleasantries nowadays; no more _bon
+camaraderie_; no more telling of Palais-Royal stories, as it used
+to be; no more cracking of jokes beside the bivouac fire. You might
+as well expect a bishop to have a game of marbles! Let a former
+brother-officer _tutoyer_ a marshal! Poor fellow! Let him try, if he
+wants to know what a paralysing, rasping, cold-blooded snub is, to get
+a flattening backhander he’ll remember as long as he wears the uniform.
+
+[Sidenote: TWO FAMOUS HARD FIGHTERS]
+
+That tall, bull-necked, heavy-featured man is Augereau; “gros comme
+un tambour-major”; absolutely fearless under fire, kind-hearted to
+those he takes a fancy to, they say, but ordinarily a coarse-tongued
+swashbuckler, with barrack-room manners. There too is Lannes, that
+keen-eyed, short man, holding his head as if he had a crick in his
+neck! He has one, a permanent one, the result of a bullet under the jaw
+from a British marine’s musket in the trenches at Acre. A hot-tempered,
+fiery, devil-may-care fellow is Lannes; but as cold as ice on the
+battlefield when things look like going wrong! Among friends,
+chivalrous and generous-hearted to a degree, his men worship Lannes;
+“the Roland of the Grand Army,” some call him. That is Moncey: and that
+very tall and erect, dry, rather dense-looking, hawk-nosed marshal with
+the shaggy eyebrows, Mortier. Mark Bernadotte there, that shifty-eyed
+Gascon with a sharp nose and thick hair; of medium height,--nobody
+really trusts him. An ingrained Jacobin--strip his arm and you will
+find tattooed on it, indelibly, for life, “Mort aux rois”--and a
+schemer, Napoleon named him a Marshal for political reasons mainly;
+although, no doubt, he has the same soldier-qualifications as the
+rest; has won a pitched battle or taken two fortresses. A cunning,
+plausible fellow is Bernadotte; with ready smile and a smooth tongue.
+He calls everybody “Mon ami” whether he is talking to a brigadier or
+a bugler. “Que diable fait il dans cette galère?” say a good many
+people of the Commander of the First Army Corps. Over yonder stands
+Bessières, Murat’s great friend; a gentlemanly enough fellow, but at
+times thick-headed, hardly of the mental calibre of his confrères. Yet
+Bessières is an ideal leader of Horse on the battlefield; as reckless
+as a lion at bay: you should see him head a charge sword in hand! One
+of Napoleon’s pets is he and the only man in the Army who sticks to his
+queue. Bessières flatly refused to cut it off when the order was given
+last June for everybody to copy “Le petit tondu” (“The little shorn
+one”), as the men call the Emperor, and it hangs halfway down his back.
+
+That dark, sleek-faced, heavy-eyed man is Jourdan, Commander-in-Chief
+once of the Army of the Revolution. “The Anvil,” some call him, he has
+been so often soundly beaten. But, all the same, he was too popular
+with the Army for Napoleon to pass him over. Jourdan it was who
+invented the conscription system. He started in life as a linen-draper
+at Grenoble. There is of course, too, Brune, who isn’t here to-day: but
+he doesn’t count for much. A minor-poet and a journalist was he once
+upon a time. He’s another of the clever-tongued Jacobins the Emperor
+gave the bâton to as a sop.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S RIGHT-HAND MAN]
+
+Look near the Emperor, at that neat athletic figure, of middle height:
+that is “Old Berthier.” He is from ten to fifteen years older than most
+of the other marshals; or, in fact, than the Emperor himself. Berthier,
+in fact, is old enough to have been a captain in the Army of the
+_ancien régime_, and can remember how he first smelt powder fighting
+under Lafayette and Washington against the British in America. He was a
+staff officer when Napoleon first came to the Ecole Militaire here from
+Brienne, as a boy gentleman-cadet. A heaven-born Chief of the Staff is
+Marshal Berthier, and the Emperor without him in a campaign would be
+like a man without his right hand. Every detail goes like clockwork
+with Berthier at the head of the Etat-Major.
+
+You should see the two of them on campaign, working together in the
+Quartier-Général. Napoleon will be sprawling on his stomach at full
+length over a huge set of maps which cover, spread out, nearly the
+whole floor of the tent; an open pair of compasses in his hand, a box
+of pins with little paper flag-heads, red, blue, yellow, green, at one
+side, some of them already stuck over the map marking the positions
+of the different corps and of the enemy. He has the compasses set to
+scale, to mark off some seventeen to twenty miles, which means from
+twenty-two to twenty-five miles of road, taking into account the
+windings. To and fro he twists and turns the compasses like lightning
+and decides in an instant the marches for each column to arrive at
+the desired point, all timed exactly to the very day and hour with an
+astonishing certainty and precision. He calls out his instructions
+in half a dozen words or so, sharply snapped out, for Berthier, who
+all the time is standing near, bending down at Napoleon’s shoulder,
+notebook and pencil in hand, to take down. Old Berthier has a veritable
+instinct for understanding what the Emperor means. He can interpret the
+smallest grunt Napoleon makes. He can spin out three or four broken
+ejaculations into detailed orders for an Army Corps, all worked out
+with absolute clearness, in beautiful language. It is amazing how he
+does it, but he does do it. A staff officer, or else Bacler d’Albe, the
+Imperial Military Cartographer, the officer in charge of the maps, it
+may be, is all the while also kneeling by the pin-box, and has the pins
+of the right colour out and stuck in the maps as fast as the Emperor
+wants them. The instant the Emperor is satisfied, Berthier is off, and
+with the secretaries at work in his own quarters drafting the orders.
+Then, before you know well where you are, a dozen _estafettes_ are
+galloping all over the country with the orders--in the case of a very
+important order sometimes three or four staff officers each take a
+copy, to ride by different routes so as to minimise the risk of delay
+or capture. That is the working of Berthier’s system, and there is not
+often a miscarriage or serious hitch in the delivery.
+
+[Sidenote: MARSHALL SOULT]
+
+And mark Soult, the coming man of the Marshals when he gets his chance;
+a wary old dog-fox for an enemy to tackle. A sergeant of infantry in
+the old “Royal Regiment” of former days, the old 13th of the Line, then
+a drill-instructor of Volunteers, now he is at the head of the Army
+at Boulogne for the descent on England. Hardly even the Emperor knows
+more about tactics than Soult. Note how self-possessed and masterful
+he looks, so cold and impassive of demeanour. Those eyes that seem to
+pierce through you, those clear-cut aquiline features, that face like
+a mask of bronze, show the character of the man. You wouldn’t think
+though, to see his fine soldier-like figure as he stands there, a
+warrior born to look at, that Soult is not only lame from a fall from
+his horse years ago, but has limped from his birth, from a club-foot.
+
+That bald-headed marshal over there is Marshal Davout, a dashing
+subaltern of Dragoons once in the Old Royal Army. A fine tactician
+for a hot place is Davout; and when the fight has been won, no leader
+so harsh and pitiless to the vanquished enemy. He wears spectacles on
+service: he can hardly see ten yards in front of his big nose. The
+ladies are very fond of Davout; he waltzes so nicely.
+
+And that other there is Marshal Ney; “the Indefatigable” is the
+Army’s name for him. He never spares himself, nor the enemy, on the
+battlefield; but after the last shot there is no more generous victor
+than Marshal Ney. For sheer dogged pluck against odds, for simply
+marvellous intrepidity, the world cannot match Ney. Stalwart and
+square-shouldered, he carries himself with all the jaunty assurance of
+manner you would expect in perhaps the most dashing leader of hussars
+the Army of France has known. He is an Alsatian, born by the Rhine; a
+pleasant-faced man, with frank grey eyes, curly red hair over a broad
+open forehead. “Red Michael” is one of the soldiers’ names for Ney; and
+there is not one of the Marshals for whom his men would do more.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES AWAIT NAPOLEON]
+
+Such, if it may be permitted to describe them in this way, is something
+of what the Marshals of Napoleon looked like on the day of the Eagle
+presentation on the Field of Mars. All eyes were turned on the Marshals
+as they stood there beside Napoleon; a brilliant array of soldierly
+figures in their red ostrich-plumed cocked hats, richly laced uniforms,
+gleaming brass-bound sword-scabbards and high jack-boots with clanking
+brass spurs.
+
+From the foot of the throne a grand staircase led down to the parade
+ground, widening out with a curving sweep to either side at the foot.
+It terminated there with, flanking the lower steps, two gilded statues,
+designed to represent, the one, “France granting Peace,” the other,
+“France making War.” From top to bottom of the stairs and extending
+at the foot to right and left along either side, stood in rows the
+colonels of the regiments on parade, together with the senior officers
+of the National Guard, all awaiting the Emperor’s appearance on the
+throne. Each bore the new Eagle standard to be presented to his own
+corps. All were at their posts as the appointed moment neared, while at
+the same time Murat and his attendant cavalcade of brilliantly bedecked
+horsemen closed in and formed up in front, so as immediately to face
+Napoleon.
+
+On either hand of Murat were ranked the massed bands of the Imperial
+Guard, flanked by two solid phalanxes of drummers, each a thousand
+strong. Near by these were drawn up on horseback, on one side the
+officers of the Head Quarters Staff at the War Office, on the other,
+the staff officers of the army corps of the Marshals.
+
+Napoleon and Josephine made their entry into the Grand Pavilion
+heralded by a procession, the bands of the Guard playing the Coronation
+March. Then, to the accompaniment of three successive shouts of “Vive
+l’Empereur!” from the soldiers--the formal greeting to Napoleon
+on parade, in accordance with Army regulation--the Emperor seated
+himself on the throne. He was in full Imperial garb, wearing his
+Imperial mantle of rich crimson velvet studded with golden bees, and
+the Imperial crown, a golden laurel chaplet “after Charlemagne.” In
+his right hand he bore the Imperial sceptre, a tall silver-gilt wand
+with an eagle surmounting it, also designed, as they said, “after
+Charlemagne.”
+
+Seating himself with Josephine at his side, in her State robes and with
+a magnificent crown of diamonds on her head, Napoleon gave the order
+for the proceedings to begin.
+
+Murat, as Governor of Paris, in immediate command of the parade, raised
+his glittering marshal’s bâton. The bands of the Guard ceased playing
+abruptly. The next moment the two thousand infantry drums began to
+beat. It was the appointed signal for the detachments to advance and
+form up in front of the throne.
+
+At once, at the first roll of the drums, the soldiers ranged round the
+ground began to move.
+
+Wheeling some, counter-marching others, here rapidly doubling, there
+marking time--looking, indeed, for the moment, at first, in the mass,
+to the untrained eye of the non-military spectator like a swarming
+ant-heap in motion and inextricably intermingled--like magic all
+suddenly appeared in order, a series of columns, the heads of which,
+arrayed at regular intervals, were in unison converging concentrically
+towards the foot of the grand staircase in front of the throne. A dozen
+paces in rear of where Murat stood all halted as one man. There was a
+quick movement of bayonets as arms were shouldered; the action making a
+glint of flashing steel in spite of the dull grey light overhead.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON FACES THE PARADE]
+
+Every sound was hushed as Napoleon rose to his feet. He faced the
+wide-spreading multitude and gazed silently over them for a moment;
+standing well forward where all might see him. Then he addressed the
+parade in strong vibrant tones which rang out clear and resonant over
+the whole assembly like a trumpet-note. In words that seemed to thrill
+with intensified energy he called on the soldiers before him, on
+behalf of themselves and their absent comrades, to take the oath of
+devotion to the Eagles.
+
+“Soldiers!” he began, his right arm outstretched with an impassioned
+gesture towards the Eagles, whose bearers held them stiffly erect, all
+glancing and gleaming like polished gold, the bright-hued silken flags
+unfurled, “behold your standards! These Eagles to you shall ever be
+your rallying-point. Wherever your Emperor shall deem it needful for
+the defence of his throne and his people, there shall they be seen!”
+
+He paused. Then raising his right hand in the air with a swift
+strenuous movement Napoleon pronounced the oath:
+
+“You swear to sacrifice your lives in their defence: to maintain them
+by your courage ever in the path of Victory! You swear it?”
+
+The vast gathering stood as though spellbound. For one instant all
+remained motionless and silent, held down as it were by overmastering
+emotion.
+
+Then, all together, with one accord, the soldiers found their voices.
+With a thundering shout that seemed to shake the air, the Army made its
+response, answering back in one deep chorus:
+
+[Sidenote: “WE SWEAR IT! WE SWEAR IT!”]
+
+“_Nous le jurons!_”--“We swear it!”
+
+One and all enthusiastically re-echoed the words; while the colonels
+excitedly brandished and waved aloft the Eagles. In a frenzy of martial
+ardour the entire assembly, at the top of their voices, again and
+again declaimed, “We swear it! We swear it!” A wild prolonged outburst
+of cheering followed, and exuberant shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”
+
+Before the cheering had abated, the drums broke in again. The sharp
+clash and rattle recalled all to order instantly. Again a dead silence
+fell over the great host, standing now with recovered arms.
+
+Up once more went Murat’s marshal’s bâton. The next moment the
+dense-set columns were standing stock-still like rows of statues, with
+arms at the shoulder.
+
+Napoleon resumed his seat on the throne, and as he did so yet once more
+a wave of enthusiasm swept over the vast array. Redoubled shouts of
+“Vive l’Empereur!” burst wildly forth, the soldiers pulling off their
+hats or helmets, and hoisting them on the points of their bayonets,
+excitedly waving them, while they shouted themselves breathless.
+
+Again the drums rolled, and again order was restored. And now the
+supreme act of the drama opened--the formal presentation of each Eagle
+to its own regimental deputation.
+
+Forthwith the wide-fronted columns, breaking swiftly into
+quarter-column formation, began to move, section by section, in turn.
+Rapidly, and, as it almost seemed, automatically, they resumed their
+first formation, extending round the Field of Mars on three sides.
+From front to rear the quarter-columns took up a full mile and
+three-quarters. Ranked in close order, the long-drawn-out array of
+troops on that set off, to a stately march from the bands of the Guard,
+to pass along the front of the Military School, before the flanking
+pavilion, and galleries and stands. So, in due course, all in turn came
+opposite to the foot of the great stairway ascending to the throne.
+
+Each section, as it came in front of the steps, made a pause. The
+Colonels at the same moment were passing in file before Napoleon. Each
+in turn inclined the Eagle that he bore towards the Emperor. He held
+the staff at an angle of forty-five degrees--the regulation method of
+salute, in accordance with an Imperial order issued in the previous
+July, when the adoption of the Eagle as the Army standard was first
+announced. Napoleon on his side, with his ungloved right hand, just
+touched each Eagle. The Colonels, then, saluting, turned, one after
+the other, to descend the stairs. At the foot of the stairway each
+delivered over the Eagle to the standard-bearer of his regiment, who,
+together with the deputation, was at the spot to receive it.[5]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ONLY EXISTING NAVAL EAGLE]
+
+With the Eagles in their charge the regimental parties moved on.
+Passing in front of the stands and pavilions beyond, all wheeled
+there, to pass again round the arena of the Field of Mars, until they
+had reached their former stations, and halted, all ranged in the order
+in which they had taken post at their first arrival.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLE OF THE IRISH LEGION]
+
+There remained after that the grand _finale_. The March Past of
+the Eagle detachments before Napoleon now came on, designed as the
+consummation of the day’s doings.
+
+In connection with that, however, there was an unfortunate incident.
+On the Field of Mars were displayed also the old Army colours of the
+Consulate, which, as has been said, had been brought to Paris at the
+order of the War Minister by the regimental deputations. Paraded
+together with the new Eagles they helped to render the scene the more
+striking; but their presence led to an unforeseen complication, and in
+the end a deplorable _contretemps_.
+
+The standard-bearers who had received the Eagles were each, in
+addition, still carrying the old regimental flag. They had to
+carry both. No instructions had been given out--by oversight, most
+probably--as to the giving up of the old flags, or what was to be done
+with them.
+
+[Sidenote: ALL DID NOT WANT THE EAGLES]
+
+It may have been that Napoleon desired that the standards of the
+Consulate and the Eagles of the Empire should be displayed together
+on that day. None knew better than he the deep attachment of the
+older men in the ranks for their former battle-flags. Some of the old
+soldiers, indeed, even there on the Field of Mars, as we are told, were
+unable to restrain their feelings at the idea of having to part that
+day from their old colours. “More than one tear was shed,” relates an
+officer, “amidst all the cheering and shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’”
+Enthusiastically as most of the soldiers might welcome the new Eagles
+in the presence of the Emperor, all did not desire to part with
+colours which had led through the battle-smoke on many a victorious
+field of the past, even in exchange for the glittering “Cou-cous,” as
+barrack-room slang had already dubbed Napoleon’s Eagles, giving them in
+advance a soldier’s nickname that stuck to them as long as the Army of
+the Empire lasted.
+
+Both sets of standards were carried in the march past, which proceeded
+without incident to a certain point.
+
+It was an effective display of the lusty manhood of France, of the
+pick of the Grand Army in its prime; not yet made _chair au canon_
+to gratify the ambition of one man. A curious commingling, too, of
+fighting costumes did the review present for the general spectators;
+those of yesterday side by side with those of the coming time.
+Three-fourths of the soldiers went by wearing the stiff Republican
+garb of the expiring _régime_, as adopted hastily at the outset of
+the Revolution: the long-skirted coat, cut after the old Royal Army
+fashion, but blue in colour instead of white, and with white lapels
+and turn-backs; long-flapped white waistcoats, white breeches, and
+high black-cloth gaiters above the knee, such as their ancestors
+had worn in the days of Marshal Saxe; the old-style big cocked hat,
+worn cross-wise, or “en bataille,” as the soldiers called it, with
+a flaunting tricolor cockade in front. The new Napoleonic style was
+represented by the Imperial Guard and Oudinot’s Grenadier Division from
+Arras and the Light Infantry battalions, whose turn out in smartly cut
+coatees faced with red and green, with the tall broad-topped shakos
+pictures of the time make us familiar with as the normal presentment of
+the soldiers of the Empire, attracted special attention.[6]
+
+During the March Past, Frimaire suddenly reasserted itself, and brought
+about the regrettable incident that was to wind up the day.
+
+The parade was three parts through, when, all of a sudden, a tremendous
+downpour of cold rain set in, discomfiting and scattering all who
+were looking on. With the drenching effect of a shower-bath the rain
+commenced to pour down in torrents, causing an immediate stampede
+among the general public. The rearmost columns of the soldiers had to
+pass before empty benches, tramping along stolidly through the mud,
+“splashing ankle-deep through a sea of mud,” as an officer put it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SPECTATORS DISAPPEAR]
+
+The spectators one and all disappeared. The immense crowd of sightseers
+left the benches on the embankment round the Champ de Mars, and fled
+home _en masse_. The seat-holders on the open stands in front of the
+Ecole Militaire scurried off in like manner. The occupants of the
+pavilions and galleries, half drowned by the water that streamed down
+on them through the awnings, quitted their places in haste to seek
+shelter within the building. The downpour saturated the canopy of the
+Imperial Pavilion and dripped through. It compelled Josephine to get up
+from her throne and hurry indoors. The Princesses promptly followed the
+Empress’s example, all except one--Napoleon’s youngest sister, Caroline
+Murat. Caroline sat the March Past out to the end, together, of course,
+with Napoleon himself and the Marshals, and those Court officials who
+had to stay where they were. Soaked through, she smilingly remarked
+that she was “accustoming herself to endure the inconveniences
+inseparable from a throne!”
+
+Then, at the close of the review, came the _contretemps_.
+
+After the last Eagle had gone past the throne, when Napoleon had left
+on his way back to the Tuileries, as the troops were moving off the
+ground to return to their quarters, unanticipated trouble suddenly
+arose in connection with the old flags. What happened may best,
+perhaps, be described in the words of an eye-witness, a General present
+on the Field of Mars, Baron Thiébault:
+
+“Immediately after the Emperor had gone and the seats all round
+were empty, finding it tiresome to be loaded with the double set
+of standards, all the more so, no doubt, as it was raining, the
+standard-bearers apparently could think of nothing better than to rid
+themselves of the superseded flags. They began everywhere to throw them
+down, that is, to drop them where they stood in the mud. There they
+were trampled under foot by the soldiers as they passed along on their
+way back to quarters.”
+
+The outrage scandalised the older soldiers, and very nearly brought
+about a mutiny among some of them.
+
+“Indignant,” to continue in General Thiébault’s words, “at such an
+outrage to national emblems which the Army had been honouring and
+defending for thirteen years past, many of the men in the regiments
+began to grumble and make angry protestations. Presently oaths and
+violent imprecations burst out on all sides; and then some of the
+grenadiers became mutinous and defiant. They declared that they
+would go back, regardless of the consequences, and forcibly recover
+possession of the old colours.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE SITUATION JUST SAVED]
+
+The situation speedily became so threatening that General Thiébault
+hastened off to warn Murat of what was happening. As he went he came
+across one of the adjutants of the Commandant of the Military School.
+On the spur of the moment he gave him orders to get together what men
+he could of the party who had been keeping the parade ground. Of these
+Thiébault took personal charge and sent them round at once to collect
+the thrown-down colours and carry them inside the Ecole Militaire.
+
+Apparently that satisfied the soldiers--anxious, most of them, to get
+out of the wet as soon as possible.
+
+General Thiébault tried after that to find Murat, intending to report
+to him; but Murat had by then left the Field of Mars. In the end the
+General decided, as perhaps the wisest course, to refrain from saying
+anything; not to take official notice of what had happened. After all
+he was not on duty at the parade; he was only in Paris as an invited
+guest at the Coronation festivities. Nobody, as a fact, said a word
+of the affair. By the authorities all reference to it seems purposely
+to have been hushed up. Not a hint of anything of the sort appeared
+in the _Moniteur_, which published a fairly full report of the day’s
+proceedings; not a word in any of the other Parisian papers.
+
+For the soldiers a dinner of double rations at the Emperor’s expense
+wound up the Day of the Eagles; for the great personages there was
+“a banquet at the Tuileries, at which the Pope and the Emperor sat
+side by side at the same table, arrayed in their Pontifical and
+Imperial insignia and waited upon by the Grand Officers of the Crown.”
+Afterwards, without delaying in the capital, the deputations set off
+on their return to rejoin their regiments. Their arrival at their
+various destinations was celebrated everywhere, by Imperial order, by
+a full-dress parade and State reception of the Eagle by each corps;
+the occasion being further treated as a fête-day and opportunity for a
+general carousal in camp or garrison. At Boulogne the regiments of the
+“Army of England” took over their Eagles at a grand review on December
+23, Marshal Soult presiding over the ceremony.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CLOSE OF THE DAY]
+
+The old standards of the Consulate, some bearing on them the
+battle-scars of Marengo and Hohenlinden, remained where General
+Thiébault’s assistants had left them stacked, leaning up against the
+wall in one of the corridors of the Military School, until they were
+carted off in artillery tumbrils to the central dépôt at Vincennes.
+There, on New Year’s Day of 1805, they were officially made away with;
+burned to ashes in the presence of an ordnance department official told
+off to certify to their complete destruction. That was the authorised
+method in France of disposing of the standards of a discredited
+_régime_; but all the same it was a hard fate for national emblems that
+had waved victoriously over so many a hard-fought field.
+
+Such were the principal scenes and incidents of the Day of the Field of
+Mars when Napoleon presented the Eagles of the Empire to the Soldiers
+of the Grand Army.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IN THE FIRST CAMPAIGN:--
+
+
+UNDER FIRE WITH MARSHAL NEY
+
+The Eagles made their _début_ on the battlefield amid a blaze of glory.
+Within a twelvemonth of the Field of Mars they had swooped irresistibly
+across half the Continent, leading forward victoriously through the
+cannon-smoke in combat after combat, to achieve the crowning triumphs
+of Ulm and Austerlitz. Within the twelvemonth they witnessed the
+overwhelming defeat of more than 200,000 foes, the capture of 500
+cannon, while 120 standards had been paraded before them as spoils of
+victory.
+
+In the first fortnight of September 1805, Austria and Russia, as the
+protagonists in Pitt’s great European Coalition against Napoleon,
+declared war on France, and an army of 80,000 Austrians traversed
+Bavaria in hot haste, to take post at Ulm by the Danube, on the
+frontiers of Würtemberg. There they proposed to hold Napoleon in check,
+until their Russian allies, whose advance by forced marches through
+Poland had already begun, could join hands with them. After that they
+would press forward in resistless force to cross the Rhine and invade
+France.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S OPENING MOVE]
+
+But Napoleon was beforehand with them from the outset. Within
+twenty-four hours of the ultimatum reaching his hands he had made the
+opening move in the campaign: the lion, whose skin had been sold, had
+crouched for the fatal spring.
+
+General Mack, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, entered Bavaria on
+September 8. On September 1 Napoleon’s “Army of the Ocean” had struck
+its tents in Boulogne camp and started on its way, with plans laid that
+ensured Mack’s overthrow. A hundred and eighty thousand soldiers were
+hastening along every high-road through Hanover, Holland, and Flanders,
+and in eastern France, towards the great plain of central Bavaria, to
+deal the Austrians the heaviest and most resounding blow ever yet dealt
+to a modern army.
+
+Napoleon, screening his movement by means of Murat’s cavalry, sent
+ahead on a wide front to occupy the attention of the Austrian outposts,
+made a bold sweep right round Mack’s right flank. Before the Austrian
+general had any suspicion that there was a single Frenchman on that
+side of him, the entire French army had passed the Danube in his rear,
+and had blocked the great highway from Vienna. Napoleon at the first
+move had cut the Austrian line of communication with their base. He
+had barred the only route by which the Russians could approach to
+Mack’s assistance.
+
+That done, swiftly and successfully, while Mack, startled and utterly
+staggered at the sudden appearance of the enemy in his rear, was
+hurriedly facing about in confusion, to try to hold his ground,
+Napoleon struck at him hard. He hurled attack after attack in force
+on the Austrian flanking divisions, on both wings of Mack’s army, and
+broke them up. Taking thousands of prisoners and many guns, he drove
+the wreck, a disorganised mass of scared and helpless battalions,
+in rout to the walls of Ulm itself. Penned in there, ringed round
+by 100,000 French bayonets, with the French artillery pouring shot
+and shell into the doomed fortress from commanding heights within
+short range, General Mack, left now with barely 30,000 men, after a
+despairing interview with Napoleon, was terrorised into immediate
+surrender at discretion.
+
+Amid such scenes did the Eagles of the Field of Mars undergo their
+baptism of fire. Ever in the forefront under fire, brilliantly, time
+and again, did those who bore them do their duty.
+
+It was round the Eagles of Marshal Ney’s corps, “the Fighting Sixth,”
+that the fiercest contests of the campaign centred; and on every
+occasion they gained honour.
+
+In the sharp brush at the bridge across the Danube at Reisenburg, near
+the small town of Günsburg, on October 8, one of the opening encounters
+of the campaign, the Eagle of the 59th of the Line showed the way to
+victory. The Austrians, whom Ney surprised on the south side or right
+bank, retreating as the French approached, had partially broken down
+the bridge before Ney’s men could reach the place.
+
+[Sidenote: AT THE BRIDGE OF GÜNSBURG]
+
+The Danube flows wide and deep at Reisenburg, and there was no other
+means of getting over.
+
+Ney had explicit orders from Napoleon to cross over and occupy
+Günsburg, and to hold the river passage. As the 59th, who led the
+attack, got to the bridge, a long and narrow wooden structure, the
+Austrian sappers were hard at work destroying it; covered by a
+rearguard brigade of infantry and artillery. The planking had been
+ripped away, but most of the bridge framework and supporting beams
+still stood. The 59th came up and opened fire, compelling the sappers
+to withdraw. Then a hasty effort was made by the pioneers of the
+regiment under fire to repair part of the bridge. They made a way
+across with planks wide enough for a few men to scramble over together.
+“In places only one man could get across at a time.”
+
+At once the 59th rushed forward cheering, but the concentrated Austrian
+fire from the other side was too hot to face. They were beaten back
+three times, the dead and wounded falling into the rushing stream
+below. But were they not the 59th? No other of the regiments following
+them in rear should have the honour of being the first to make the
+passage! The Eagle-bearer of the 59th, weaving the Eagle aloft,
+headed a fourth attack; with Colonel Gerard Lacuée, the colonel of
+the regiment, a distinguished officer and an Honorary A.D.C. to the
+Emperor, beside him. The two led out in front, regardless of the storm
+of bullets round them. Colonel Lacuée fell mortally wounded. An officer
+ran forward and carried the Colonel back to die on the river-bank, but
+the Eagle-bearer went on. “Soldiers,” the brave fellow stopped for an
+instant to turn round and shout back to his comrades, “your Eagle goes
+forward! I shall carry it across alone!” The men of the 59th, thrown
+into a frenzy at the sight of their Eagle’s peril, rallied instantly to
+follow. The four leading companies held on bravely and got across. Then
+they charged the Austrians at the point of the bayonet and drove them
+back into the village. That, though, was not all. Fresh Austrians had
+turned back to help their rearguard troops. Firing from the river-bank
+on either side of the village, for a time they stopped the other
+French regiments from crossing the bridge after the 59th. Austrian
+dragoons and infantry at the same time charged the gallant regiment,
+entirely isolated now on that side of the river. But they could not
+break the 59th. Forming square, the two battalions, with their Eagles
+held on high as rallying-centres, kept a host of foes at bay. Three
+fierce Austrian charges did they beat off--and then help arrived.
+A second regiment, the 50th, had by then managed to get across the
+bridge. The two regiments maintained themselves there all the afternoon
+until nightfall and then bivouacked on the ground they had won until
+morning, “passing an anxious time, under arms, unable to light a fire.
+Fortunately, in the dark the Austrians did not realise our small
+numbers. They were more anxious to cover their own retreat.” Before
+daylight the Austrians fell back and the passage of the Danube was won.
+
+There was another morning’s work on October 11.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES AT HASLACH]
+
+At Haslach, on the north bank of the Danube, not far from Ulm, a
+brigade of Dupont’s Division of Ney’s corps, advancing on that side
+on its own account, was suddenly set on by five times its number of
+Austrians. The brigade was made up of three regiments: the 9me Légère
+(or 9th Light Infantry), the 32nd, and the 69th. They stumbled, as it
+were, suddenly on the Austrians, whereupon General Dupont, who was
+riding with the brigade, on the opposite side of the river from the
+rest of his troops, “judging that if he fell back it would betray
+his weakness,” made a dash at the enemy. His daring deceived the
+Austrians, who believed that he was the advanced guard of a large force
+close behind. They held back at first and awaited attack. Throwing
+the 32nd into Haslach to hold the village, Dupont boldly charged with
+the two other regiments, and at the first onset made 1,500 prisoners,
+numbers equal to a quarter of his total force. The Austrians, however,
+rallied and returned to the fight. They brought up reinforcements and
+entrenched themselves in the village of Jüningen, near by, where again
+Dupont attacked them. Five times did the 9th Light Infantry take and
+retake Jüningen at the point of the bayonet, their two battalion Eagles
+heading the attack each time. No fewer than six officers, bearing the
+Eagles in turn, fell in the fight. “Ces corps ne devaient étonner de
+rien,” commented Napoleon in praising Dupont and his men.
+
+At Elchingen, a village in the immediate neighbourhood of Ulm, the
+scene of the brilliant victory by which Marshal Ney won his title of
+Due d’Elchingen, the Eagles of two regiments won distinction, through
+the individual heroism of the officers who, holding them on high,--“En
+haut l’Aigle!” was the charging cry--led the onset that stormed the
+place.[7]
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES STORM ELCHINGEN]
+
+Ney headed the 6th Light Infantry personally, “in full uniform and
+ablaze with decorations, offering a splendid target to the enemy.” Ney
+led the 6th with the Eagle of the First Battalion carried close at
+his side. Fifteen thousand Austrians with forty guns held Elchingen,
+and the post is described as being “one of the strongest positions
+that could be imagined.” The village itself, a large place, consisted
+of “successive piles of stone houses, intersected at right angles
+by streets, rising in the form of an amphitheatre from the banks of
+the Danube to a large convent which crowns the summit of the ascent.
+All the exposed points on heights were lined with artillery; all the
+windows filled with musketeers.” The village was on the north bank, and
+the river had to be crossed to get to it.
+
+First the gallant 6th Light Infantry stormed the bridge. It had been
+partly destroyed by the Austrians on the day before, and its tottering
+arches were now swept by cannon-balls, plunging down from batteries on
+the heights in rear, and a tornado of bullets from sharpshooters in the
+houses near the river-side. Fighting their way forward step by step,
+the 6me Légère went on. Their Eagle headed the advance. Its bearer was
+wounded, but he proudly brandished on high the standard; its silken
+flag torn to tatters by bullets, and with one wing of the Eagle broken
+by a shot. With the 6th fought the 69th of the Line. The two regiments
+forced their way along the steep crooked main street up hill, fired
+down on furiously meanwhile from the windows. Parties of men at times
+entered the houses at the sides and fought the enemy inside bayonet to
+bayonet, from floor to floor. The 6th and the 69th pressed forward,
+broke down the enemy’s resistance, and carried Elchingen. The Austrians
+finally, after a gallant attempt to hold out in the convent on the
+hilltop, abandoned it as fresh French troops came up from across the
+river.
+
+On the battlefield, when the fight was over, Napoleon, with the
+Imperial staff round him, publicly congratulated Marshal Ney (he named
+him later “Duc D’Elchingen”) in the presence of the 6th Light Infantry
+and the 69th, specially paraded at the spot for the occasion.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES AT ULM]
+
+The Eagles of Ney, again, were foremost at the winning of the final
+fight at Ulm. They led the furious onrush that stormed the steep
+heights of Michelsberg and Les Tuileries, the key of the last Austrian
+position. Thence Napoleon looked down directly into the fortress; and
+within an hour of Ney’s brilliant final feat the French shells, from
+batteries, quickly galloped up to the heights, were bursting in Ulm,
+carrying terror and death into every quarter of the city.
+
+On that came the surrender of General Mack. The curtain next rises on
+the intensely dramatic Fifth Act of the tragedy, the march out of the
+Austrians to lay down their arms.
+
+In that display the Eagles had their allotted place. Before them,
+brought forward and prominently paraded, each Eagle in advance of its
+own corps in line, with the whole Grand Army ranged in battle order as
+spectators of the scene, the standards of the vanquished foe defiled
+out of the gates of Ulm, and were laid down on the ground in formal
+token of surrender.
+
+Napoleon proved himself at Ulm a born stage-manager.
+
+Hardly ever before, never in modern war, had such a spectacle been
+witnessed as that presented on that chill and cheerless October Sunday
+forenoon, October 20, 1805, in the heart of central Germany, beside the
+banks of the rushing Danube, roaring past, a yellow foaming torrent
+after weeks of autumn rain, amid pine-clad summits extending far and
+wide on either hand.
+
+Along the lower slopes of the high ground to the north and east of
+Ulm, drawn up in lines and columns over a wide semi-circle, stood the
+victorious army; massed round, as it were, in a vast amphitheatre. They
+formed up by army corps, and took post grim and silent, drawn up in
+battle array, with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed. The Cavalry with
+sabres drawn were on one side; the Infantry on the other, facing them
+and leaving a space between, along which the Austrians were to pass.
+Fifty loaded cannon, in line along one ridge, pointed down on the city.
+In front, towards the river, there rose a small knoll, an outlying spur
+of rock. On that Napoleon took his station beside a blazing watchfire
+which marked the spot from far. Accompanying him were most of the
+marshals and the assembled Etat-Major of the Grand Army, a numerous and
+brilliant gathering. Immediately in rear stood massed the 10,000 men of
+the Imperial Guard.
+
+Two army corps, a little way from the rest, had a special post of
+honour. They were drawn up at the end of the wide semi-circle of the
+main army nearest the Augsburg gate of Ulm; immediately where the
+defilading column of captives would present themselves before passing
+Napoleon to lay down their arms and standards. The two corps were: that
+on the right, Ney’s, the Sixth Army Corps, the heroes of the day _par
+excellence_; on the left, the Second Corps, Marmont’s, who had been
+doing notable work elsewhere in the neighbourhood of Ulm. Ney, with his
+personal staff beside him, was on horseback in front of the centre of
+his corps; Marmont had his post in like manner in front of his men. As
+his personal reward for the leading part Ney and the Sixth Corps had
+had in bringing about the triumph, that marshal had the special honour
+of being designated to superintend the surrender.
+
+A few minutes before ten o’clock the French drums began to beat, and
+the regimental bands to play. Immediately after that the long-drawn-out
+procession of sullen and woebegone-looking Austrian captives began
+silently to trail its way out of the Stuttgart gate of the fortress.
+“Suddenly we saw an endless column file out of the town and march up in
+front of the Emperor, on the plain at the foot of a mountain.”
+
+[Sidenote: MACK SURRENDERS HIS SWORD]
+
+General Mack himself headed it, wan-faced and pale as the white
+uniform coat he wore, his eyes filled with tears, his head bowed,
+a pitiful and abject figure to behold. After him followed eighteen
+Austrian generals--a surprising number--most of them as wretched
+and downcast-looking as their chief. “Behold, Sire, the unfortunate
+Mack!” was the ill fated leader’s address to Napoleon, as he formally
+presented his sword. Napoleon, in a mood--as well he might be--in
+that hour of unparalleled triumph, to show courtesy to the fallen
+foe, desired Mack to keep his sword and remain at his side. He said
+the same to the eighteen other generals as, one by one, they came up
+in turn to tender him their swords. He returned each his sword and
+bade them all place themselves near their chief. When all the swords
+had been presented and returned, Napoleon made the Austrian generals
+collectively a short harangue. “Gentlemen,” he began, “war has its
+chances! Often victorious, you must expect sometimes to be vanquished!”
+He did not really know, Napoleon went on, why they were fighting.
+Their master had begun against him an unjust war. “I want nothing on
+the Continent,” said Napoleon in conclusion, “only ships, colonies,
+and commerce!” It was on the day before Trafalgar that these memorable
+words were spoken. The Austrian generals stared at Napoleon blankly,
+but not one uttered a word. “They were all very dull; it was the
+Emperor alone who kept up the conversation.” Then they took their stand
+beside their conqueror and looked on at the bitterly humiliating scene
+of the defilade of their fellow soldiers.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PARADE OF THE VANQUISHED]
+
+In an almost incessant throng the columns of the Austrian army
+streamed by: white-clad cuirassiers; hussars in red and blue and grey;
+battery after battery of cocked-hatted, brown-garbed artillerymen,
+riding with or on their rumbling dull-yellow wheeled guns; battalion
+after battalion of white-coated linesmen; dark-green coated jägers;
+Hungarian grenadiers, and so on. Twenty-seven thousand officers and
+men and sixty field-guns in all defiled past the Eagles, proudly
+arrayed there above them, in front of the serried lines of glittering
+French bayonets along the hillsides. For five hours on end the host
+of captives plodded on before the rocky brow from which Napoleon
+surveyed the spectacle; tramping by, their muskets without bayonets
+and unloaded, their cartridge-boxes emptied. In several regiments the
+men maintained a fair semblance of discipline and military order; but
+the ranks of all were sadly bedraggled-looking, the white uniforms
+torn and soiled and besmirched with powder-smoke, with many of the men
+hatless, or limping from wounds, or with bound-up heads, and their arms
+in bloodstained slings. As had been ordered by Napoleon, they carried
+with them their standards; no fewer than forty silken battle-flags--for
+the most part cased, but here and there was to be seen one not furled,
+displaying, as though in futile defiance, its flaunting yellow folds
+with the double-headed Black Eagle.
+
+As the Austrian linesmen came abreast of where Napoleon stood, the
+pace of the men slackened. Every eye was turned to look at “him”; at
+the small grey-coated figure on foot beside the watchfire, standing
+near the crestfallen group of their own generals, a few paces from the
+bright and brilliant-hued cavalcade of French marshals and the staff.
+All stared at Napoleon, gazing as if under a spell. Then, in the midst
+of it all, this happened. Suddenly, as they passed Napoleon, a shout
+rose from among the ranks of the defeated army: “Es lebe der Kaiser!”
+(“Long live the Emperor!”) The cry burst forth with startling effect.
+It was repeated, and then several men took it up. But what did it
+mean? “Es lebe der Kaiser!” was the national German greeting in salute
+to their own Austrian sovereign as Head of the Empire, to the Kaiser
+at Vienna, the Emperor of Germany. Did the soldiers who first raised
+the cry intend it for that, or to hail Napoleon, as his own men did,
+with a “Vive l’Empereur!”? The words bore the same meaning. Or did the
+men fling the words at Napoleon in a sort of bravado, as a show of
+defiance? Some of the Austrians assuredly did mean them so; to relieve
+the breaking strain, the terrible tension of the ordeal. At least some
+of the French officers near Napoleon took that view of it. “As they
+passed by,” describes one, “the prisoners, seized with wonder, with
+admiration, slowed down in their march to gaze at their conqueror,
+and some cried out ‘Long live the Emperor!’ but no doubt under very
+different emotions; some with evident mortification.”
+
+[Sidenote: GIVING UP THE GUNS AND HORSES]
+
+From the presence of Napoleon the captive army passed to the scene of
+the act of final humiliation: to the place where, midway between the
+lines of bayonets of the troops of Ney and Marmont, they were to lay
+down their colours and ground their arms.
+
+The colours were first surrendered, a French General, Andréossi,
+formerly Napoleon’s Ambassador in London, receiving them, with half a
+dozen staff officers and orderlies, who deposited the flags one by one
+in two commissariat wagons drawn up close by.
+
+It was a moment of the deepest and keenest anguish for proud and
+gallant soldiers. All round them on the hillsides most of the French,
+overcome by excitement over the unprecedented and amazing spectacle,
+were by that time almost beside themselves, rending the air with
+exulting shouts and cheers. Under the cruel stress of the ordeal,
+as the supreme moment came on, the self-possession of some of the
+Austrians, tried beyond endurance, gave way.
+
+The men of the Cavalry and Artillery bore themselves throughout with
+well-disciplined steadiness. As they came to the appointed place where
+groups of French cavalry troopers and gunners, told off to take over
+their horses and guns, were standing near the roadside awaiting them,
+they dismounted at the word of command from their own commanders
+and stood back. With hardly a murmur from the ranks the Austrian
+troopers unbuckled their swords and carbines and pistols, and dropped
+them in heaps at the places pointed out to them. With quiet dignity
+the officers relinquished their gold-embroidered banners into the
+enemy’s hands. In grim silence they saw the victors--who there at
+any rate behaved with courtesy and soldierly consideration for the
+feeling of the vanquished--step forward to take possession of their
+horses and their cannon. Many of the Austrians had tears running down
+their cheeks; some stood trembling with suppressed passion;--but all
+preserved order and behaved with complete decorum as became disciplined
+soldiers.
+
+With others unfortunately, with some of the infantry corps, it was
+otherwise. At the very last, before arriving at the place where they
+were to give up their weapons, a number of the men in some of the
+marching regiments broke down under the fearful strain of the moment
+and lost their heads. In many regiments, no doubt, the soldiers obeyed
+mechanically, acting like men half stunned after a violent shock; they
+did as they were told, and passively grounded their arms to order.
+But in others the final scene was attended by acts of wild frenzy,
+pitiful to behold. In, as it were, a paroxysm of exasperation at the
+disgrace that had befallen them, the rank and file of these broke out
+recklessly, and got at once beyond all efforts of their officers to
+control. With one accord they began smashing the locks and butts of
+their muskets on the ground with savage curses, flinging away their
+arms all round, and stripping off their accoutrements and stamping on
+them, trampling them down in the mud. These, though, as has been said,
+were only some of the men; and in certain regiments. The majority of
+the Austrians bore themselves with fortitude and calmness.
+
+At the end of the afternoon the Imperial Guard, headed by their Eagle
+and band, marched into Ulm and through the city, as we are told, “amid
+the shouts of the whole populace.”
+
+So terminated the tragedy of Ulm, in the presence of the Eagles on
+their first triumphant battlefield.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ULM TROPHIES FOR PARIS]
+
+The spoils of the Eagles at all points, as announced by Napoleon in
+the Ulm Bulletin of the Grand Army, were 60,000 prisoners, 200 pieces
+of cannon, and, in all, 90 flags. The 40 standards surrendered at Ulm
+itself Napoleon sent to Paris forthwith--after a grand parade of the
+trophies at Augsburg, in which ninety sergeants of the Imperial Guard
+bore in procession the Austrian flags. The Ulm trophies were made an
+Imperial gift for the Senate. “It is a homage,” wrote Napoleon, “which
+I and my Army pay to the Sages of the Empire.” They were the flags, it
+may be added, which were displayed at the head of Napoleon’s coffin on
+the occasion of his State funeral in 1840: they form four-fifths of the
+trophies now grouped round Napoleon’s tomb. Alone of the trophies of
+the Ulm campaign, and also of the Austerlitz campaign which followed
+it, they escaped destruction in the holocaust of Napoleon’s trophies
+that took place at the Invalides in March 1814, on the night of the
+surrender of Paris to the Allies. How that came to pass will be told
+later.
+
+There was a very interesting sequel to the Ulm campaign for one of
+Ney’s regiments. A brief but brilliant campaign in the Tyrol on their
+own account followed for Ney’s men immediately after Ulm.
+
+Entering the Tyrol with two of his divisions, Ney attacked and
+by brilliant tactics overthrew the Tyrolese forces and Austrian
+regulars who barred his way in a position among the mountains deemed
+impregnable. The battalion Eagles of the 69th gave the signal for
+the frontal attack which stormed the enemy’s position. Guided by
+chamois-hunters the soldiers with the Eagles scaled the face of a
+precipitous line of crags which overhung in rear the Austrian centre,
+by inserting their bayonets into fissures in the rocks and clinging
+to shrubs and creepers, their havresacs tied round their heads as
+protection from the stones that the Tyrolese above showered down on
+them. At the top, driving in the defenders, they held up the gleaming
+Eagles in the sunlight on the brink of the precipice to the marshal
+below, firing down on the Austrians at the same time to demoralise
+their resistance and clear the way for Ney’s main effort: “Les Aigles
+du 69me plantées sur la cime des rochers servirent de signal à
+l’attacque de front que le Maréchal Ney avait preparé.”
+
+Innsbrück, the capital of the Tyrol, and the head-quarters of the
+Austrian army corps garrisoning the country, was the immediate prize of
+the victory. It was there that this incident took place.
+
+[Sidenote: TWO LOST FLAGS ARE FOUND]
+
+One of Ney’s regiments, the 76th, had fought in the Tyrol six years
+before; in Masséna’s campaign of 1799, in one of the battles of
+which--at Senft in the Grisons, on August 22--two of its battalions
+lost their colours. An officer of the regiment, while visiting the
+arsenal at Innsbrück after Ney’s capture of the city, came across the
+two flags there, in tatters from bullet-holes, hung up as trophies. He
+made known his discovery, and the place was quickly filled with the
+soldiers of the regiment, eager to see the old flags. “They crowded
+round them and kissed the fragments of their old colours, with tears in
+their eyes.”
+
+Ney had the flags removed at once. He restored them to the custody
+of the regiment with his own hand at a grand parade in the presence
+of the rest of his army, which the marshal attended with his staff,
+all in full uniform. The old colours were received with an elaborate
+display of military ceremonial. They were borne along the lines while
+the regimental band played a stately march, and the Eagles of both
+battalions were formally dipped in salute to them.
+
+On receiving Ney’s report, Napoleon thought fit to give the recovery
+of the flags a Bulletin to itself. Relating how they had been lost in
+battle, and the “affliction profonde” of the regiment in consequence,
+he set forth how they had been found and handed back by Marshal Ney to
+the regiment “with an affecting solemnity that drew tears from the eyes
+of both the old soldiers and the young conscripts, proud of having had
+their share in regaining them!” “Le soldat Français,” concluded the
+Bulletin, “a pour ses drapeaux un sentiment qui tient de la tendresse;
+ils sont l’objet de son culte, comme un présent reçu des mains d’une
+mère.” A medal was specially struck to commemorate the event; and
+Napoleon, in addition, specially commissioned an artist, Meynier,
+to paint a picture for him of Marshal Ney presenting the recovered
+colours to the regiment. The painting is now in one of the galleries of
+Versailles.
+
+
+THE MIDNIGHT BATTLE BY THE DANUBE
+
+[Sidenote: TRAPPED BY NAPOLEON’S FAULT]
+
+A startling and dramatic episode of the first campaign of the Eagles
+comes next. It took place during the second stage of the war; in
+the midst of Napoleon’s impetuous advance on Vienna down the Danube
+valley after Ulm. Intent on dealing a shattering blow at the advanced
+army corps of the Russians, which had reached Lower Austria and was
+making an effort to cover the capital, Napoleon made a false move,
+and left one of the headmost French divisions in an exposed position,
+temporarily isolated. It got trapped by the Russians at Dürrenstein, or
+Dirnstein, on the north side of the Danube, to the west of and about
+seventy miles up the river from Vienna; and was all but annihilated.
+There was nearly twenty hours of continuous fighting, including a night
+battle of the fiercest and most desperate character in which three
+Eagles were temporarily lost; fortunately to be recovered later among
+the dead on the battlefield.[8]
+
+It was on an extemporised corps, specially placed under the command of
+Marshal Mortier, that the blow fell.
+
+[Illustration: NAPOLEON’S CONCENTRATION IN REAR OF ULM]
+
+While Napoleon and the Grand Army in force advanced along the south, or
+right, bank of the Danube, Mortier had been detached across the river
+to hold in check any attempt to interfere with the main operations
+from the Bohemian side. A body of Austrian cavalry, under the Archduke
+Ferdinand, had managed to cut their way through from Ulm at one point
+just before the closing of the net round General Mack. With the aid of
+the local militia levies these might prove troublesome on the line of
+communications. To deal with them, three divisions, drawn from as many
+corps, were amalgamated as Mortier’s special corps, which numbered in
+all between twenty and twenty-five thousand men: Gazan’s division, lent
+by Marshal Lannes; Dupont’s, lent by Ney; Dumonceau’s, lent by Marmont.
+To keep Mortier in touch with the main body of the army, and that he
+might be reinforced in emergency, a flotilla of Danube craft was at
+the same time improvised, and placed in charge of the Seamen of the
+Guard, a battalion of whom had accompanied Napoleon for the campaign.
+The flotilla was to keep pace with Mortier and link him with Napoleon.
+Mortier crossed at Linz and moved forward; his three divisions each a
+day’s march apart, for convenience of provisioning. He marched so fast,
+however, that he outstripped the connecting boats.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DANUBE FLOTILLA STOPPED]
+
+At the moment the fighting opened, the flotilla was miles in rear.
+It had been stopped and its progress blocked near Moelkt, unable in
+the swollen state of the Danube to pass the dangerous Strudel, or
+whirlpool, there, raging just then, after the heavy autumn rains,
+with the force of a swirling maelstrom. The flooded river had made it
+extremely difficult work all the way, even for the picked Seamen of
+the Guard, to navigate with safety the assortment of boats and timber
+rafts, clumsy structures of logs and spars lashed together, 160 feet
+long each, and planked over, with cabins on the planks, which composed
+the flotilla. On them, together with a quantity of spare stores and
+ammunition for the army, convalescents and footsore men of various
+regiments were being carried, who, it was intended, would thus be on
+the spot to reinforce Mortier first of all in case of danger.
+
+Immediately after passing Dürrenstein, the leading division, General
+Gazan’s, numbering some 6,000 men, unexpectedly stumbled across part
+of the Russian rearguard. All unknown to Mortier, the Russian army
+corps which had been entrenched in front of Vienna had abandoned its
+position and had hastily withdrawn north of the river, crossing a short
+distance from Dürrenstein.
+
+Mortier, after clearing a narrow and difficult pass on the eastern
+side of Dürrenstein, with steep and rocky hills on one hand and the
+Danube on the other, first learned of the presence of the enemy by
+catching sight of the smoke of the burning bridge of Krems, which the
+Russians had set fire to after passing over. Then he suddenly found
+his further advance barred by troops with guns, who rapidly formed up
+across his path. The Russians took up a formidable-looking position,
+but the marshal decided to attack without waiting for Dupont to come
+up with the Second Division, or for the flotilla; both miles in rear.
+The sight of the burning bridge and the apparent haste of the enemy
+to get across the river, it would seem, misled Mortier into thinking
+that the Russians had been in action with Napoleon, and were in flight,
+trying to escape. He went at them without pausing to reconnoitre. He
+assumed that they were only making a show of defence. The troops before
+him he would sweep aside easily. Then he would press on and complete
+the rout of the rest of the Russians, whom he took to be retreating in
+confusion, screened by the force he saw, across his front. Confident
+of easy success, Mortier entered into the fight then and there.
+
+[Sidenote: A SURPRISE FOR THE MARSHAL]
+
+The sudden rencontre, as has been said, was a surprise for the
+marshal. Half an hour previously a battle had been almost the last
+thing in Mortier’s thoughts. His guns were on board a number of river
+boats which were being drifted downstream abreast of the troops, the
+artillery horses being led with the marching columns along the bank.
+The boats had been requisitioned a few miles back, so as to enable
+the troops to get on faster over the rough stretch of road through
+the Pass of Dürrenstein. The guns were hastily disembarked and raced
+forward into the firing line in order to stop a forward movement that
+the Russians, who promptly took advantage of the opportunity offered by
+Mortier being apparently without artillery, began by making.
+
+The Russians came on and quickly increased in numbers, to Marshal
+Mortier’s further surprise. Were those beaten troops in full flight?
+They began to swarm down to meet the French; heading for the guns as
+these were being brought forward. The fight rapidly became general, and
+charge after charge was made by the Russians to carry Mortier’s guns.
+They captured them, but were then beaten back and the guns recaptured.
+Twice were the guns taken and retaken. The two French regiments nearest
+the guns, the 100th and 103rd, defended them with brilliant courage,
+their four battalion Eagles conspicuous in the forefront and repeatedly
+the centre of desperate fighting, as the Russians essayed again and
+again at the point of the bayonet to make prize of the gleaming emblems.
+
+But more and more Russians kept joining in, and after four hours of
+very severe fighting the marshal began to get anxious. He had gained
+ground towards Krems, and had made some 1,500 prisoners; but every
+foot of the way had been stubbornly contested, and his losses had been
+serious.
+
+Mortier after that left the troops, and with an aide de camp galloped
+back through the pass in order to hasten up Dupont. But the Second
+Division was still at a distance. Dupont’s men were still a long way
+beyond Dürrenstein and could not arrive for some time yet. Mortier
+could only tell them not to lose a moment, and then retrace his own
+steps. On his way back, to his amazement, he came upon a second Russian
+column in great strength in the act of debouching from a side pass and
+entering Dürrenstein. It had come round by a track among the hills on
+the north to take Gazan’s division in rear, and interpose between it
+and Dupont’s reinforcing troops. At considerable personal risk the
+marshal managed to evade discovery by the Russians. By following a
+devious by-path he at length got back to where Gazan’s division was;
+as before, in hot action and slowly forcing the Russians back.
+
+[Sidenote: TOO LATE TO CLEAR THE PASS]
+
+Mortier stopped the advance at once. He faced his troops about, and,
+while keeping off his original enemy, retreated; closing his columns
+and rushing all back as fast as possible to repass the defile of
+Dürrenstein and confront the new enemy on the further side, in a
+position he might hold until Dupont could reinforce him. But it was
+already too late. The French reached the entrance of the pass on the
+near side to find it already occupied by the Russians, who were pouring
+through in dense masses. There were nearly 20,000 of them on that side
+of him and 15,000 on the other, his former foes now fast closing in
+from behind hard on his heels. Mortier’s reduced ranks numbered barely
+4,000 all told.
+
+Owing to the high, steep rocks on one hand, and the river on the other,
+it was impossible to push past the Russians on either flank. All that
+could be done was to attack in front and try to cut a way through.
+That; or to surrender! With reckless impetuosity the French attacked,
+firing furiously and flinging themselves on the Russian bayonets;
+while their rearguard, facing round, kept their first foes back. For
+two long hours they fought like that; their ranks swept by the enemy’s
+cannon on each side. At length they forced the entrance to the pass:
+but they could get no farther. They had by then lost all their guns
+but two: but they still had all their Eagles. With bullet-holes through
+some of them, and their silken flags shot away or torn to tatters,
+the Eagles did their part. Now they were rallying-centres; now they
+were leading charges. There was hardly a battalion in which the first
+standard-bearer had not gone down.
+
+All were fighting almost without hope, holding out in sheer despair
+as long as they had cartridges left, when, as that dreadful November
+afternoon was drawing to its close, suddenly, from beyond the far end
+of the pass was heard the booming of a distant cannonade. The soldiers
+heard it and hope revived. It could only be Dupont! Help, then, was
+coming! The despairing rank and file took heart again--but the hour of
+rescue was not yet.
+
+They had four long hours more to go through; every hour making their
+terrible situation worse. At nightfall “our cavalry gave way, our
+firing slackened, our bayonets, from incessant use, became bent and
+blunted. The confusion became terrible. Things, indeed, could hardly
+have got worse.” So an officer describes. The enemy, in places, had
+got right in among them, but “our soldiers, being the handier and more
+agile, had an advantage over the great clumsy Russians.” Here and there
+“the men were so close, that they seized each other by the throat.”
+In the midst of the fiercest of the fighting the tall figure of the
+marshal was conspicuous. He was seen amid the flashes from the muskets
+“at the head of a party of grenadiers, sword in hand, laying about him
+like any trooper.”
+
+[Sidenote: “YOUR DUTY IS TO SAVE THE EAGLES!”]
+
+The Battalion-Eagles of the 100th, with their Porte-Aigles and a
+handful of soldiers, got cut off together, amid a surging _mêlée_
+of Russians. The major of the regiment, Henriot by name, the senior
+surviving officer--the colonel of the 100th, as also the colonel of the
+103rd, had fallen earlier in the fight--saw what was happening and the
+extreme peril of the Eagles. Calling for volunteers, he got together
+some of his men, cut his way through to the Eagles, and rescued them.
+Major Henriot, after that, having saved the Eagles for the moment,
+determined as a last resource to attempt a forlorn-hope charge; to
+get beyond the enemy and reach Dupont with them. It might be possible
+to save them under the cover of darkness. One of the Porte-Aigles of
+the 6th Light Infantry with his Eagle, near by at the moment, joined
+the devoted band of men that the intrepid major now managed to rally
+round the Eagles of the 100th. With half a dozen stirring words Henriot
+called on them to follow him. “Comrades, we must break through! They
+are more than we, but you are Frenchmen: you don’t count numbers!
+Remember, your duty is to save the Eagles of France!” (“Souvenez vous
+qu’il s’agit de sauver les Aigles Françaises!”)
+
+There was a hoarse shout in reply: “We are all Grenadiers! Pas de
+charge!”
+
+They dashed at the Russians, Henriot leading, and, after fighting their
+way through the pass and nearly to Dürrenstein, fell to a man. Yet the
+three Eagles did not fall into Russian hands, thanks to the darkness.
+They were found next morning by French search-parties under a heap of
+dead, where the last survivors, fighting back to back, had fallen while
+making their final stand.
+
+So desperate, indeed, did things look for the French at one time, a
+little before midnight, that some of his staff appealed to Mortier to
+make his escape and get across to the other side of the Danube in a
+boat, “so that a Marshal of France shall not fall into the hands of the
+enemy!”
+
+But the gallant veteran flatly refused to listen to the proposal.
+
+“No,” was his answer, “certainly not! I will not desert my brave
+comrades! I will save them or die with them! Keep the boats for the
+wounded,” he went on. “We have still two guns and some case-shot--rally
+and make a last effort!”
+
+Almost immediately afterwards an opportunity did offer for the marshal
+to save them.
+
+[Illustration: MARSHAL MORTIER.]
+
+[Sidenote: A DASH IN THE DARK TO HELP]
+
+Two of Dupont’s regiments at that moment reached the battle. By
+persistent exertions, outstripping the rest of the Second Division,
+and continuing in the dark, guided by the flashes of the guns, they
+had made their way by a goat-path along the steep rocky slopes at the
+side of the defile and taken the Russians barring Mortier’s retreat in
+rear. Instantly the new arrivals flung themselves hotly into the fight.
+They were the 9th Light Infantry and the 32nd of the Line, that old
+favourite of Napoleon’s in the days of the Army of Italy, whose flag on
+the Eagle-staff bore, as has been said, the golden inscription which
+Napoleon had placed there--“J’étais tranquille, le brave 32me était là.”
+
+The golden legend was of good omen for Mortier.
+
+Their interposition put the Russian main force between two fires,
+weakening the attack on Mortier and compelling a portion of them to
+face about. Its effect was speedily felt, and at once; although a
+desperate effort by the two regiments to break through and join hands
+with Mortier, in which the Eagles of the 9th and 32nd were “taken and
+retaken,” was beaten back under pressure of numbers.
+
+The arrival of the two regiments so opportunely put heart into all:
+Dupont’s whole division, declared the marshal, could not be far off.
+He himself would make an effort to meet him on the farther side of the
+pass.
+
+“Then,” as is described by Napoleon’s aide de camp, Count de Sègur,
+“rallying and closing up the remaining troops, he brought up the
+only two guns left him. One was to point towards Krems and against
+Kutusoff’s troops; the other Mortier placed at the head of the column,
+in the direction of Dürrenstein. As all the drums had been broken he
+had the charge sounded on iron cooking-cans.
+
+“At that moment the Austrian general, Schmidt, who had led the Russian
+corps from Dürrenstein, headed a final charge which was to strike a
+crushing blow and complete the destruction of our column. But Fabvier
+(the colonel in charge of Mortier’s artillery) heard them advance.
+Concealed by the darkness, he let Schmidt approach quite near. Then
+he suddenly fired the gun on that side, at the shortest range, in
+among the headmost of the attacking troops. The discharge threw the
+enemy into confusion and killed their leader. Into this bloody opening
+Mortier and Gazan precipitated themselves, overthrowing everything
+before them. Dürrenstein itself was retaken in the impetuous dash.”
+
+It was indeed a _tour de force_; a sudden reversal of the fortunes
+of the fight. The feat in its complete accomplishment surprised even
+Mortier’s expectations. “The Marshal, in fact, could hardly believe
+his own success.” So an officer puts it. But he had done more than
+burst through the toils. As daylight next morning showed, the Russians,
+driven headlong, had abandoned six of their guns, and left in the
+hands of the French no fewer than twelve standards. Two of them
+were taken by the two Dupont regiments which had so gallantly flung
+themselves on the Russian rear.
+
+That was as concerned honour and glory. As a set off, barely 2,000
+remained of Mortier’s corps of 6,000 men. Two-thirds of the total when
+the roll was called next day were found to have fallen on the field.
+
+[Sidenote: THEIR FATE STILL IN DOUBT]
+
+Mortier’s men regained Dürrenstein, all in flames; set on fire by the
+Russians as they evacuated the village. But where was Dupont and his
+Division? They had heard Dupont’s distant guns just before dark; but
+except the two regiments who had been rushed forward independently,
+ahead of the main body, starting immediately after Mortier’s visit in
+the early afternoon, no help from Dupont had reached them. Gazan’s
+wearied survivors of the midnight battle dared not even yet lay aside
+their arms. The fight was not all over. The enemy were still near by;
+just beyond the outskirts of the village. Both the Russian divisions
+that they had been fighting with in front and rear had in the end
+united. Outnumbering Mortier’s men as they did by ten to one, the
+Russians would certainly turn back and be on them before long with
+re-formed ranks, eager to take vengeance for their defeat and the rough
+handling they had undergone.
+
+But the end was near.
+
+Suddenly, from the farther side of Dürrenstein, from the direction
+in which the enemy had fallen back, there came a violent outburst of
+firing. Immediately on that followed sounds of shouting. Then there was
+the trampling rush of a great host of men all making for the village.
+“With despair in our hearts we were preparing for another battle, when,
+in answer to our challenge of ‘Qui vive?’ came back, with electrifying
+effect, the answer ‘France!’ It was Dupont. At last he had arrived to
+the rescue of his Marshal.
+
+“We recognised each other in the light of the blazing houses, and with
+transports of joy and gratitude and cries of ‘Long live our rescuers!’
+our men threw themselves on the necks of their deliverers.”
+
+In that dramatic fashion the battle of Dürrenstein reached its close.
+The Russians fell back under cover of the night, retreating up the
+lateral valley-pass, by which way at the outset they had worked their
+way round, guided by the Austrian general, Schmidt, to surprise and cut
+off Gazan’s division.
+
+Napoleon, in his great relief at learning that Mortier had come through
+without disaster, for once blamed nobody. He knew that he himself was
+most of all to blame, for exposing to sudden attack a comparatively
+weak detachment of his army in the face of an enemy still full of
+fight, on the farther side of a deep and rapid river. “It seemed,”
+in Marbot’s words, “as if no explanation of this operation beyond the
+Danube satisfactory to military men being possible, there was a desire
+to hush up its consequences.”
+
+[Sidenote: BY WAY OF COVERING THE BLUNDER]
+
+By way of covering up his own glaring blunder Napoleon heaped praises
+on the troops engaged. He expressed unbounded admiration at the stand
+they had made. In the 22nd “Bulletin of the Grand Army,” issued from
+Schönbrunn, near Vienna, two days later, the Emperor declared that
+“le combat de Dürrenstein sera à jamais mémorable dans les annales
+militaires.” Gazan, he said, had shown “beaucoup de valeur et de
+conduite.” The 4me and 9me Légère and the 32nd and 100th of the Line,
+wrote Napoleon, “se sont couverts de gloire.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ON THE FIELD OF AUSTERLITZ
+
+
+Austerlitz, the crowning triumph of the First War of the Grand Army,
+set its _cachet_ to the fame of the Eagles.
+
+Napoleon there lured the enemy on into attacking him at apparent
+disadvantage on ground of his own choosing. Then, availing himself to
+the fullest extent of the flagrant blundering of his assailants, he
+struck at them with a smashing, knock-down blow from the shoulder.
+
+[Sidenote: LURED ON TO MEET THEIR FATE]
+
+By making believe that his army was separated in detachments, out of
+touch, and beyond possibility of early concentration, and causing
+it to appear further that he had become alarmed for his own safety
+and was on the point of commencing a retreat, he decoyed them into
+a false move. He tempted the Czar Alexander, whose main force had
+arrived within a few miles of Vienna, and was confronting him, into
+making a rash manœuvre designed to cut his line of communications and
+defeat him before the second Austrian army in the field, under the
+Archduke Charles, hastening from the Italian frontier to join hands
+with the Russians, could reach the scene. In the confident belief that
+by themselves they outnumbered Napoleon at the critical point by two
+to one, with nearly 90,000 men to 40,000, the Russians made a risky
+flank march to interpose between Napoleon and his base, and drive him
+in rout into the wilds of Bohemia. They began their advance suddenly,
+on Thursday, November 2, but immediately afterwards wasted two days
+through faulty leadership. Before they could get within striking
+distance of Napoleon he had called in his detached corps and had massed
+70,000 men at the point of danger. Foreseeing the possibility of the
+enemy’s move, his apparent disposal of the various corps had been
+elaborately arranged so as to ensure concentration at short notice in
+case of emergency.
+
+From hour to hour during Sunday, December 1, the Russian army in dense
+columns streamed past within six miles of the French position in full
+view of Napoleon, all marching forward in stolid silence, intent only
+on getting between Napoleon and Vienna. No counter-move meanwhile was
+made from the French side. Strict orders were sent to the outposts
+that not a shot was to be fired. But by the early afternoon all was
+ready for action. Completely seeing through the enemy’s plans, Napoleon
+exclaimed in a tone of absolute confidence: “Before to-morrow night
+that army is mine!”
+
+On Napoleon’s right flank, in a strong defensive position, stood
+Marshal Davout’s corps, thrown back at an angle to the main front of
+the army, so as to induce the enemy to extend themselves widely on
+that side before opening their attack. Marshal Soult’s corps, the
+most powerful in the Grand Army, formed the centre; supported by the
+Imperial Guard, Oudinot’s Grenadier Division, and two divisions of
+Mortier’s corps. Marshal Lannes’ corps, with Bernadotte’s, was on
+the left, as well as Murat’s cavalry. Napoleon proposed to allow the
+Russian leading columns to circle round his right flank and get into
+action with Davout. Then, as soon as they were committed to their
+attack in that quarter, Soult’s immense force would hurl itself on the
+Russian centre and break through it by sheer weight of numbers. Thus
+the Allied Army would be cleft in two, after which Napoleon would only
+have to fling his weight to either side for the enemy to be destroyed
+in detail. During Soult’s move, Lannes on the left flank was to hold
+in check by a brisk attack the Russian right wing and reserves, which
+would prevent assistance reaching the centre until too late to save the
+day. So the battle was planned; so it was fought and won.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Plan of the Positions of the Armies at the
+opening of the Battle of AUSTERLITZ]
+
+The Allied columns were seen during Sunday afternoon to be steadily
+moving southward over a high ridge opposite the French camp,
+crowned near the centre by the lofty plateau of Pratzen, the key
+of the position on the Russian side. They streamed along from the
+direction of the village of Austerlitz, a short distance away to the
+north-east, from which the battle took its name. A tract of low marshy
+country, the valley of the little river Goldbach, four miles across,
+with two or three hamlets dotting it here and there, connected by
+narrow cart-roads, divided the two armies. The French position, facing
+eastwards, was on a range of tableland along the west side of the
+valley of the Goldbach.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KEY OF THE POSITION]
+
+Monday morning came, and the “Sun of Austerlitz”--so often
+apostrophised by Napoleon in after days--rose in a cloudless sky above
+the early mists lying dense over the marshy ground of the low-lying
+valley between the armies. The dominating crest of the Pratzen plateau
+showed above the mist almost bare of troops. On the evening before
+it had bristled with Russian bayonets, glistening in the rays of the
+setting sun. Pratzen, the master-key of the battlefield, had been left
+unoccupied. The enemy’s corps had taken no measures to hold it in their
+haste to get forward to attack the French right wing, and cut Napoleon
+off.
+
+Soult’s corps--the entire French army had been under arms since four
+o’clock--was ordered to descend into the valley before the morning mist
+dissipated as the sun rose. Under cover of the mist Soult was to get
+as close as possible to the foot of the Pratzen Hill, so as to be on
+the spot ready to seize the height immediately the battle opened on the
+right.
+
+Napoleon waited, standing among the marshals on foot near the centre
+of the position, until between seven and eight o’clock. Then sharp
+firing suddenly broke out from the direction of Davout’s corps, and a
+few minutes later an aide de camp came galloping up with the news that
+the enemy were attacking the right wing in great force. “Now,” said
+Napoleon, “is the moment.” The marshals sprang on their horses and
+spurred off to head their corps.
+
+So Austerlitz opened.
+
+Its first brunt, as Napoleon had foreseen, fell hard and heavily on the
+French right wing; but Davout’s men there proved well able to maintain
+their ground. The sturdy linesmen on that side disputed every foot
+of the position at the point of the bayonet against four times their
+numbers.
+
+Right gallantly, time and again, did the Eagles on that part of the
+field fulfil their rôle and take their part; now heading charges, now
+rallying round them the men who had sworn to die in their defence.
+
+[Sidenote: “SOLDIERS, I STAY HERE!”]
+
+The 15th Light Infantry--a corps in the ranks of which were many young
+soldiers, now under fire for the first time in their lives--stormed the
+village of Tellnitz, which the Russians had carried in their first
+rush on the French outposts. The leading battalion of the 15th drove
+the Russians out; and, dashing on beyond the village, met a reinforcing
+Russian column hastening to the spot. They charged it without
+hesitation, but could not break through, and then they began to recoil
+before superior numbers. The Eagle-bearer was shot down, and fell badly
+wounded. He had to leave hold of his Eagle, and amid the surging throng
+of soldiers in disorder it was in great danger of being trampled under
+foot and lost. Fortunately the officer in command, _Chef de Bataillon_
+Dulong, saw what had happened, and sprang from his horse and seized
+the Eagle. Holding it on high with one hand, he shouted to his men to
+stand fast. “Soldiers, I stay here!” he called. “Let me see if you will
+abandon your Eagle and your commander.” The act and words checked the
+disorder. The battalion rallied at once, re-formed ranks, and made head
+against the enemy until help arrived, when the Russians were driven
+back.
+
+The Eagle of another battalion in the same division of Davout’s army
+corps, General Friant’s, the 111th of the Line, a little time later had
+its part. The 111th had suffered heavily in the earlier fighting, but
+towards eleven o’clock were called on to lead a counter-attack beyond
+the line of fortified hedgerow that the regiment was holding, against
+a fresh Russian column which was advancing with loud shouts and
+bayonets at the charge to storm their position. Immediately in front
+was a wide, open stretch of ground, across which a Russian battery, to
+cover the attack, was pouring a tremendous fire of shell, the bursting
+projectiles tearing up the ground as if it were being ploughed. Just
+as the order to advance was given, the Porte-Aigle fell dead. An old
+sergeant, Courbet by name, took his place. He seized the Eagle and
+looked round, for several of the men were wavering. They were unwilling
+to leave cover for certain death, as it looked, on the shell-swept
+space of open ground before them. Courbet climbed over the hedge, and,
+waving the Eagle and flag with both hands, stood by himself amid the
+bursting shells, some twenty yards in front. “Come on, comrades!” he
+shouted--“come on!” Then with the words, “A moi, soldats du 111me!”
+brandishing the Eagle, he ran straight at the fast-nearing Russians.
+“The effect,” says one who saw the brave deed done, “was electric.” The
+men streamed over the hedge instantly, re-formed line in spite of the
+cannon-balls, and, led by the grenadiers of the battalion, charged the
+approaching enemy, broke them, drove them before them, and seized the
+village in front, whence the Russians had made their advance.
+
+The Eagle of the 48th, another of Friant’s regiments, in like manner
+was rallied in the moment of supreme crisis by the daring of its
+Eagle-bearer.
+
+[Sidenote: SUDDENLY FIRED ON BY FRIENDS]
+
+The Eagle of the 108th, which regiment was fighting near by, all but
+fell into the enemy’s hands through a blunder. It was early in the
+morning, at the very beginning of the fight, in crossing a marshy
+strip under cover of the mist, to take in flank the Russian attack. In
+the uncertain light another French regiment, the 26th Light Infantry,
+one of Soult’s regiments, moving about a hundred yards on the left
+of Davout’s men, mistook the 108th for the enemy, and fired heavily
+into it. The Eagle-bearer was among those shot down, and fell with the
+Eagle. This sudden blow from an unexpected quarter staggered the 108th.
+They fell back hastily to re-form in rear, leaving their Eagle, whose
+fall had been unobserved in the mist, lying beside its dead bearer on
+the ground. The loss was discovered just as another force of Russians,
+who came up in front, reached the place; but before they could carry
+off the trophy a charge forward by some hastily rallied men of the
+108th recovered the Eagle and bore it back to safety.
+
+So far then with Davout’s corps.
+
+Soult, meanwhile, in the centre, was striking hard. His attack, in its
+effect on the Allied Army, was a complete surprise. Soult’s advance
+began the instant that the marshal, riding at full gallop from the
+presence of Napoleon, could reach his men. At that moment the third of
+the Russian columns in the order of march, pressing ahead to overtake
+the first and second, and join in the attack on Davout, had not long
+descended the southern slope at the foot of the Pratzen heights; while
+the fourth Russian column, a mile or more in rear, was just about to
+ascend the northern slope to cross the Pratzen Hill and follow.
+
+Up the steep western hillside face of the Pratzen clambered Soult’s
+regiments. Unseen by the enemy at any point, without a shot being fired
+at them, or by them, until just as they were nearing the crest-line of
+the ridge, they emerged from the mists of the valley and seized the
+high ground.
+
+They moved on a front of three divisions. Legrand’s was on the right,
+echeloned in the direction of Davout’s left flank so as to keep touch
+with that marshal. St. Hilaire’s was in the centre, advancing in a long
+line of battalions in attack formation. Vandamme’s division was on the
+left.
+
+The Allied fourth column caught a glimpse of Vandamme’s men as they
+were climbing the last ascent, and raced forward to form up and bar
+their way. There were 14,000 troops in the column, half Austrians, half
+Russians; and the Czar Alexander with the Emperor of Austria rode with
+them.
+
+[Illustration: MARSHAL SOULT.
+
+In the uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the Chasseurs of the Guard.]
+
+Attacking at once, the French broke through the Allied front line,
+and, after a hard fight--for the Austro-Russian regiments, fighting
+under the two Sovereigns’ eyes, resisted with desperate valour--forced
+it back on the second line with the loss of several guns.
+
+[Sidenote: GRAPE-SHOT AT THIRTY PACES]
+
+Again there the Eagles took their part. On the right of St. Hilaire’s
+attack, the brigade of General Thiébault became separated in the
+fighting with the Russian foremost line. Its three regiments--the
+10th Light Infantry, the 14th, and the 36th--became separated, and
+one of them, the 36th, was for a time in danger of being overpowered
+by part of the Russian third column, which had faced about on hearing
+the firing in rear and was hastening back up the hill. Two Russian
+regiments raced up towards them on that side. Some Austrian infantry
+of the fourth column, extending in their direction, were at the same
+time coming at them on the left. In front the 36th was faced by two
+Russian batteries, which dashed up, unlimbered, and blazed away,
+firing grape and case shot at barely thirty paces; as well as by some
+Russian dragoons, who made as if about to charge. To keep the dragoons
+off, the leading battalion attempted to form square; but the men,
+breathless after their rush uphill, were in some disorder and for
+the moment out of hand. The square, while yet half formed, was then
+nearly torn to pieces by a staggering discharge of grape, and several
+of the men began to get unsteady. It looked bad for the 36th, when,
+of a sudden, Adjutant Labadie, of the First Battalion, snatched the
+Eagle from its bearer and ran out in front. He stopped short and held
+the Eagle-staff with both hands planted firmly on the ground. Then he
+called to the men, in a momentary pause while the Russian gunners were
+reloading: “Soldiers of the 36th, rally to the front! Here is your line
+of battle!” The men saw him, and obeyed. The disorder ceased. Quickly
+deploying to right and left, they dashed at the Russian guns. At the
+same moment the other two regiments of the brigade, led by St. Hilaire
+and the brigadier, sword in hand, came up at the _pas de charge_,
+bayonets levelled. The 10th Light Infantry brilliantly repulsed the
+Austrians on one side: the 14th on the other side drove Kamenskoi’s
+Russians back down the hill.
+
+Supporting the 10th Light Infantry was the 59th of the Line, one of
+Mortier’s corps, of Dupont’s division, which had been sent forward
+to help in holding the Pratzen heights. Some of the Russian dragoons
+dashed in among them as they deployed to follow the 10th. A Russian
+officer cut down the Eagle-bearer and seized the Eagle. Sergeant-Major
+Gamier, the “Porte-Aigle,” struggled to his feet in spite of his
+wounds, wrested the Eagle back, and with his free hand fought with his
+sword and killed the Russian, saving the Eagle.
+
+On St. Hilaire’s left, during this time, Vandamme’s division had had
+to fight its way forward against the Russians and Austrians of the
+fourth column, several battalions of which, with artillery, had rapidly
+taken post along a range of knolls towards the northern edge of the
+Pratzen plateau. Driving back at the outset six Russian battalions,
+which charged forward to meet them, springing up from the shelter of
+a dip in the ground, Vandamme’s men, “without firing a shot, with
+the bayonet only, advanced on the main enemy with shouldered arms,
+not replying to the Russian musketry.” When within forty yards, they
+halted, fired a volley, and dashed in with bayonets lowered. The attack
+was successful beyond expectation. The enemy before them were routed,
+and all their guns taken, with many prisoners. Then Vandamme received
+orders to wheel his division to the right and take in flank the enemy,
+at that moment in hot fight with St. Hilaire.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RUSSIAN GUARD COME UP]
+
+Vandamme was in the middle of the move when one of his brigades met
+with a sudden and unexpected disaster. Two battalions belonging to the
+24th Light Infantry and the 4th of the Line, who fought side by side on
+the extreme left of Vandamme’s command, were all but annihilated. As
+they were wheeling round, the Russian Imperial Guard came up, hurrying
+forward from the Reserve, and set on them fiercely. It was just to the
+left of the village of Pratzen, as approached from the French side,
+on the farther side of the plateau. The Russian Foot Guards forced the
+4th and the 24th Light Infantry back into some vineyards adjoining the
+village in disorder. The last to retire was the First Battalion of
+the 4th. They had hardly gained the edge of the tract of vineyards,
+when, without the least warning of their approach, coming up on their
+flank and unseen in the smoke and turmoil of the contest, a more
+formidable enemy still assailed them. The Russian Cuirassiers of the
+Guard, 2,000 horsemen, troopers of the finest cavalry in the world,
+came down on them, and charged them at a gallop on the flank. The Grand
+Duke Constantine, brother of the Czar, in person led the Cuirassiers.
+Disaster, hideous, overwhelming, crushing, for the two hapless
+battalions--that of the 24th Light Infantry was, in like manner, caught
+just beyond cover exposed in the open--was the instant result. They
+tried to form square at the last moment, but the Cuirassiers were
+on them before they could begin the evolution. Both battalions were
+practically hurled out of existence within three minutes.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW ONE EAGLE MET ITS FATE]
+
+They were ridden down, trampled on by the huge Russian horses, and
+slashed to pieces mercilessly by the giant Russian troopers with their
+long straight swords. Both battalions lost their Eagles. That of the
+24th Light Infantry was picked up later on the field and restored
+to what was left of the ill-fated corps. The Eagle of the 4th was
+carried off by the Russians, and is now in the Kazan Cathedral at St.
+Petersburg. Yet it was lost with honour; bravely defended to the last.
+The Eagle-bearer was cut down. A lieutenant tried to get hold of the
+Eagle and save it; he, too, was cut down. A private then snatched it
+from the dead officer’s hands, and was in the act of waving it on high
+when he in turn was sabred and fell. The Russians made prize of the
+trophy at once, and it was carried direct to the Czar Alexander on the
+battlefield.
+
+Napoleon, who had moved up near the fighting in the centre, witnessed
+the disaster with his own eyes.
+
+The corps, as it happened, too, was one he had taken an interest in.
+The 4th of the Line had been in favour with him, and he had appointed
+his brother Joseph as its colonel when the 4th was at the Camp of
+Boulogne as part of the “Army of England.” He had, indeed, specially
+chosen that particular corps for its steadiness. He announced Joseph’s
+appointment to it in a message to the Senate on April 18, 1804, “in
+order that he should be allowed to contribute to the vengeance which
+the French people propose to take for the violation of the Treaty [of
+Amiens] and be afforded an opportunity of acquiring a fresh title to
+the esteem of the nation.”
+
+In wild panic the survivors of the disaster fled to the rear, tearing
+by close past where Napoleon and the Staff were. “They almost rushed
+over us and the Emperor himself,” describes De Ségur, who as an aide
+de camp was close to the Emperor at the moment. “Our effort to arrest
+the rout was in vain. The unfortunate fellows were quite distracted
+with fear and would listen to nothing. In reply to our reproaches
+for so deserting the field of battle and their Emperor, they shouted
+mechanically ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and they fled away faster than ever.
+
+“Napoleon smiled pitifully. With a scornful gesture, he said to us:
+‘Let them go!’ Retaining all his calmness in the midst of the confusion
+he despatched Rapp to bring up the Cavalry of the Guard.”
+
+Rapp, another of the Imperial aides de camp, was also Colonel of the
+Mamelukes of the Guard. He was at the moment riding close behind
+the Emperor. Rapp darted off, and, after taking Napoleon’s order to
+charge the Russian Cuirassiers to Marshal Bessières, in command of the
+Cavalry of the Guard, he himself led their headmost squadrons forward;
+his own swarthy Mamelukes with two squadrons of Chasseurs and one
+of Horse Grenadiers. Waving his sabre and calling at the top of his
+voice, “Vengeons les! Vengeons nos drapeaux!” “Avenge them! Avenge our
+standards!” he led them forward at full gallop. “We dashed at full
+speed on the artillery and took them,” described Rapp in a letter. The
+guns were those of a Russian battery which had just come into action
+close by where the Guard Cuirassiers had charged. “The enemy’s horse
+awaited our attack at the halt. They were overthrown by the charge and
+fled in confusion, galloping like us over the wrecks of our squares.”
+
+[Sidenote: “WE FOUGHT MAN TO MAN”]
+
+But the Russians rallied quickly. Reinforced by the superb regiment
+of the Chevalier Guards, a corps in which all the troopers were men
+of birth, they came on to meet the French again. Just at that moment
+Bessières, with at his back the magnificent cavalry of Napoleon’s
+Guard, came up at full speed. Rapp’s squadrons rejoined, and both
+Imperial Guards met in full career. “Again we charged,” says Rapp, “and
+this charge was terrible. It was one of the most desperate cavalry
+combats ever fought, and lasted several minutes. The brave Morland,
+Colonel of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard, fell by my side. We
+fought man to man, and so mingled together that the infantry on neither
+side dared fire, lest they should kill their own men.” They fought it
+out until the Russians gave back and broke and fled--in full sight of
+the Czar and the Austrian Emperor, who from some rising ground near by
+had been spectators of the desperate affray.
+
+The survivors of the hapless First Battalion of the 4th of the Line
+had meanwhile recovered themselves. Rallied by their officers, they
+had been brought back into the battle. They returned with their nerve
+restored, now only anxious to make amends for the disgrace they had
+brought on the Grand Army. They were in time to join in the final
+advance beyond the Pratzen heights and cross bayonets with an Austrian
+regiment, from which they took its two standards. That feat, as will be
+seen, was to serve them in good stead later on.
+
+The charge of the Cavalry of the Guard practically decided the fate
+of the day at Austerlitz. Napoleon at once brought up Oudinot’s
+Grenadiers, Bernadotte’s battalions, and the regiments of the Old Guard
+to further reinforce Soult’s divisions. The Allied centre was shattered
+and driven in at all points, and forced back for a mile-and-a-half
+beyond the field of battle. It resisted desperately to the last, and
+several fierce counter-attacks were made; but in vain.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOG THAT SAVED AN EAGLE]
+
+In one of these the Eagle of the Chasseurs à Pied of the Imperial
+Guard had a narrow escape. According to the story it was saved by
+a dog--“Moustache,” a mongrel poodle that had attached himself to
+the corps and become a regimental pet. The Eagle-bearer of the
+First Battalion, to whom the dog was much attached, and whom he was
+following, was shot, and the Eagle dropped to the ground beneath the
+man’s body. An Austrian regiment was making a counter-attack at that
+point, and before the Eagle could be picked up, three Austrian soldiers
+ran forward to seize it. Two of them attacked the two men of the Eagle
+escort. The third was faced by “Moustache,” who kept him off, growling
+savagely and snapping at the Austrian from behind the dead body of the
+Eagle-bearer. The man dropped his musket, drew his hanger, and cut at
+“Moustache,” slicing off a paw. But in spite of that the dog managed
+to keep him off until assistance came. Then the three Austrians were
+bayoneted and the Eagle was saved. Marshal Lannes, on hearing the
+story, had a silver collar made for “Moustache,” with a medal to hang
+from it, inscribed on one side, “Il perdit une jambe à la bataille
+d’Austerlitz, et sauva le Drapeau de son régiment”; and on the other,
+“Moustache, chien Français; qu’il soit partout respecté et cheri comme
+un Brave.” “Moustache,” in the end, it may be said, died a soldier’s
+death. He was killed by an English cannon-ball at Badajoz, and was
+buried on the ramparts there, with a stone over him, inscribed: “Cy git
+le brave Moustache.”
+
+The Allied centre broken through, the end came on swiftly all over the
+field of battle.
+
+On Napoleon’s left wing, Lannes and Murat had engaged the Russian rear
+column (or right wing as they fronted to fight) immediately after Soult
+opened the main attack. They had done their part by holding in play
+the enemy in front, thus preventing the Allied troops on that side
+from moving up to reinforce the centre. There, too, as elsewhere, the
+Eagles of Napoleon’s battalions fulfilled their _rôle_; one Eagle in
+particular, that of the 13me Légère, achieving special distinction.
+When the Allied centre gave way, Lannes and Murat pressed forward
+impetuously, forcing their antagonists back, and driving them off the
+field to the north-east, past the village of Austerlitz.
+
+Davout, on Napoleon’s right, finished his task at the same time; in no
+less workmanship fashion. As Soult swung round his victorious divisions
+to the right to take the Russian left wing in rear, Davout’s moment
+came and he gave the order to advance. Surging forward with exultant
+shouts the stout-hearted defenders of that fiercely contested side of
+the field swept down on the assailants they had kept at bay for five
+long hours. The Russians did their best to make a brave resistance, but
+the day was lost. Formed in close-packed columns they fell back, losing
+guns and colours, and hundreds of prisoners.[9]
+
+[Sidenote: VICTORS AND VANQUISHED]
+
+As darkness closed in, the last shots were fired at Austerlitz.
+Crushing and complete had been the overthrow. The Allied army fled
+in wild panic. It left on the field 30,000 men, dead, wounded, or
+prisoners, 100 guns, and 400 ammunition caissons. Forty-five standards
+were in the hands of the victors. Twelve thousand men in killed and
+wounded was the price Napoleon paid. It was a big price; but the
+victory to him was worth the sacrifice. At five next morning an aide
+de camp from the Austrian Emperor presented himself before Napoleon to
+beg for an immediate suspension of hostilities. The Emperor Francis
+himself had an interview with Napoleon during that afternoon, and, as
+the result, terms of peace--to include the Austrian Emperor’s Russian
+allies--were mutually agreed on; to be formally settled between the
+diplomatists as soon as possible, Pressburg in Hungary being named for
+the meeting-place.
+
+We come now to the dramatic sequel to Austerlitz which awaited the
+ill-fated First Battalion of the 4th of the Line. They had to face
+Napoleon and render account to him personally for the loss of their
+Eagle. The dreaded interview came some three weeks later; at a grand
+parade of Soult’s corps before the Emperor at Schönbrunn--as it befell,
+on Christmas Day.
+
+Napoleon, attended by the Imperial Staff, most of the marshals, half
+a hundred other officers of rank, and nearly as many aides de camp,
+passed down the long line of troops, congratulating most of the
+regiments on the parts they had individually taken on the different
+battlefields. In due course the Emperor came to the regiments of
+Vandamme’s division, ranged in their allotted place, the 4th of the
+Line among them. Its First Battalion, reduced by the disaster to a
+quarter of the normal strength, stood at the head of the regiment,
+looking gloomy and disconsolate, the only corps on parade without its
+Eagle.
+
+Napoleon approached the place with a frown on his face and a look as
+black as thunder. He reined up opposite the battalion and addressed it
+in a loud angry tone.
+
+“Soldiers,” he began hoarsely. “What have you done with the Eagle which
+I entrusted to you?”
+
+The colonel of the regiment replied that the Eagle-bearer had been
+killed at Austerlitz in the _mêlée_ when the Russian cuirassiers
+charged the regiment, and the Eagle had been lost in the tumult and
+confusion of the moment. There was no survivor of those who had seen
+the Eagle-bearer fall. The battalion, indeed, did not know of its loss
+until some time later. One and all deeply deplored what had happened,
+but they desired to inform His Majesty most respectfully that they,
+single-handed, had captured two Austrian standards, and implored his
+consideration on that account, begging that he would allow them to
+receive a new Eagle in exchange.
+
+The whole regiment supported the colonel’s request with loud shouts,
+“réclama à grands cris.” But Napoleon’s countenance remained unchanged.
+
+[Sidenote: SCATHING CENSURE AND BITTER SCORN]
+
+He replied coldly and contemptuously: “These two foreign flags do not
+return me my Eagle!” Then, after a pause, he launched out into words of
+the severest censure and rebuke, telling the men that he had seen them
+with his own eyes in flight at Austerlitz. He poured bitter scorn on
+their conduct, “in phrases, stinging, burning, corrosive, which those
+present remembered long afterwards--to the end of their lives.”
+
+Again the unhappy colonel pleaded his hardest for his men. He entreated
+the Emperor’s clemency, once more beseeching Napoleon to allow that
+they had wiped out the slur on their good name, and to grant the
+battalion a new Eagle.
+
+Napoleon said nothing for a moment. Then he again addressed them in an
+abrupt tone:
+
+“Officers, sub-officers, and soldiers, swear to me here that not one of
+you saw your Eagle fall. Assure me that if you had done so you would
+have flung yourselves into the midst of the enemy to recover it, or
+have died in the attempt. The soldier who loses his Eagle on the field
+of battle loses his honour and his all.”
+
+“We swear it!” came the reply at once.
+
+At that there seemed to come a change in the Emperor’s mood. He paused
+once more for a few moments, during which there was dead silence. Then
+he raised his voice: “I will grant that you have not been cowards;
+but you have been imprudent! Again I tell you that these Austrian
+standards--even, indeed, were they six--would not compensate me for my
+Eagle.”
+
+He stopped short. He seemed to be musing for a moment, looking straight
+into the eyes of the men. After that, with a curt “Well, I will restore
+you yet another Eagle!” Napoleon turned his horse and rode on down the
+line of troops.
+
+[Sidenote: THEY FOUND THE OTHER EAGLE]
+
+It was quite true, as the colonel told Napoleon, that the regiment
+was unaware at the time that their Eagle had been lost. As a
+fact, search-parties--practically all the survivors of the First
+Battalion--were out on the day after Austerlitz hunting over the
+battlefield among the dead for their lost Eagle. By the irony of fate
+it was they who picked up and restored the Eagle of the 24th Light
+Infantry to their fellows in adversity; the Russians, it would seem,
+had not marked its fall in the confusion of the fighting. At any rate
+it was left where it fell and where it was found.
+
+There was, as it curiously happened, no reference in the Austerlitz
+Bulletin published in France--the 30th “Bulletin of the Grand Army”--to
+the loss of its Eagle by the 4th of the Line, although the disaster to
+the battalion is reported. “Un bataillon du 4me de Ligne fut chargé
+par la Garde Impériale Russe à Cheval et culbuté.” That was all that
+was said on the subject. Yet, on other occasions later, when Eagles
+were lost, mention was made of the misfortune in one or other of the
+Bulletins, with, generally also, some remark by way of explaining away
+the unpleasant fact, and now and then a caustic comment by Napoleon.
+A picture connected with the incident was, however, painted--at whose
+request is unknown. It is now in the national collection of military
+pictures of the campaigns of Napoleon at Versailles. It shows the First
+Battalion of the 4th of the Line at the Schönbrunn review “presenting
+Napoleon with two Austrian standards taken by them from the enemy, and
+claiming in exchange a new Eagle for themselves.”[10]
+
+This closing word may be said of the spoils of the Eagles at Austerlitz.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RECEPTION IN NOTRE DAME]
+
+The forty-five flags captured in the battle, with five others selected
+from those taken at Ulm, making fifty in all, were presented by
+Napoleon to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. With the trophies he sent this
+message: “Our intention is that every year on the 2nd of December a
+Solemn Office shall be sung in the Cathedral in memory of the brave men
+who fell on the great day.” The flags were borne in triumph, together
+with the trophies of the Ulm campaign,--120 captured standards and
+colours in all--through the streets of Paris on January 15, 1806, amid
+a tremendous demonstration of popular enthusiasm. “The behaviour of
+the people,” wrote Cambacérès, “resembled intoxication.” Four days
+later the Austerlitz flags were received at Notre Dame by the assembled
+Cathedral clergy, Cardinal du Belloy at their head, with elaborate
+religious ceremonial.
+
+Said the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris in his address from the
+Altar-steps: “These banners, suspended from the roof of our Cathedral,
+will attest to posterity the efforts of Europe in arms against us;
+the great achievements of our soldiers; the protection of Heaven over
+France; the prodigious successes of our invincible Emperor; and the
+homage which he pays to God for his victories.” Not one of the flags
+exists now. They disappeared mysteriously, in circumstances to be
+described later, in the early hours of March 31, 1814, the day on
+which the victorious Allies entered Paris, and Napoleon withdrew to
+Fontainebleau.
+
+Fifty-four of the other trophies paraded through Paris, flags taken in
+the Ulm campaign, were presented by Napoleon, as has been said, to
+the Senate. In return a picture of the scene at the reception of the
+trophy-flags was ordered to be painted for presentation to the Emperor.
+It is now at Versailles.
+
+The remaining sixteen trophies were divided by order of the Emperor.
+Eight were sent to the Assembly Hall of the Tribunate; eight to the
+Hôtel de Ville as a gift to the city of Paris.
+
+Thus did France receive the first spoils of the Eagles.
+
+“Soldiers,” said Napoleon to the Grand Army, in his Austerlitz
+Proclamation; “I am satisfied with you. You have justified my fullest
+expectations of your intrepidity. You have decorated your Eagles with
+immortal glory!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+IN THE SECOND CAMPAIGN
+
+
+JENA AND THE TRIUMPH OF BERLIN
+
+The curtain rises this time on an act in the War Drama of the Eagles
+unique in the startling incidents of its historic _dénoûment_.
+
+Prussia, in September 1806, threw down the gage to Napoleon and drew
+the sword for a trial of strength, with the full assurance of victory.
+There was no doubt in Germany as to the issue; not the least anxiety
+was felt. No troops in the world, declared one and all, could stand up
+to the Prussian Army. It was easy, they said at Potsdam and Berlin, to
+account for what had happened last year on the Danube. Any sort of army
+could have won in that war. Timidity and want of skill in the Austrian
+generals, deficient training in the men, had been, beyond dispute, the
+reason of the disasters. It would be otherwise now. Napoleon would have
+to meet this time the Army of Prussia; the best drilled and smartest
+soldiers in the world, organised and trained under the system that the
+Great Frederick had originated and himself brought to perfection.
+“His Majesty the King,” said one of the Prussian generals, addressing
+a parade at Potsdam, “has many generals better than Napoleon!” In the
+Prussian Army, from veteran field-marshal to drummer-boy, there were
+no two opinions as to what must be the outcome of a clash of arms with
+France. The wings of Napoleon’s Eagles would be clipped once for all.
+
+But to hurl defiant words was not enough. Yet further to display
+contempt for their French foes, the young officers of the Prussian
+Guard marched one night in procession through the streets of Berlin to
+demonstrate in front of the French Embassy. Shouting out insults and
+jeers, they brandished their swords before the windows of the mansion
+and made a show of sharpening the blades on the Ambassador’s doorsteps.
+The Prussian King’s ultimatum went forth, couched in language there was
+no mistaking, and the Royal Guard Corps set out from the capital for
+the frontier with flags displayed and their bands playing triumphal
+airs, chanting songs of the victories of the Great Frederick, and
+shouting themselves hoarse with cries of “Nach Paris!” All over Prussia
+it was the same. The marching regiments tramped through the towns and
+villages, their colours decked with flowers, their bands playing, and
+with the swaggering gait of victors returning from conquest.
+
+[Sidenote: A REPLY WITHIN A WEEK]
+
+The Prussian ultimatum, delivered on September 1, haughtily demanded
+a reply from France within a week. It was accepted with alacrity.
+Napoleon had foreseen all and laid his plans. “Marshal,” he said to
+Berthier, with a grim smile, as he read the ultimatum, “they have given
+us a rendezvous for the 8th; never did Frenchman refuse such an appeal.”
+
+The Eagles never swooped to more deadly purpose, with results more
+amazing and more dramatic, than in that campaign.
+
+Within three days of the firing of the first shot, a Prussian division
+of 9,000 men had been routed with heavy loss at Schleitz in Thuringia;
+and Murat’s cavalry had captured elsewhere great part of the Prussian
+reserve baggage-trains and pontoon equipment. On the fourth day of the
+war, at Saalfeld in Thuringia, 1,200 Prussian prisoners were taken and
+30 guns. In the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, both fought on the same
+day, October 14, 20,000 Prussian prisoners, 200 guns, and 25 standards
+were spoils to the Eagles. At Erfurth, on the next day, a Prussian
+field-marshal with 14,000 men, 120 guns and the whole of the grand
+park of the reserve artillery of the army were taken. At Halle 4,000
+Prussian prisoners were taken, with 30 guns; at Lübeck 8,000 prisoners
+and 40 guns. Magdeburg, one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, with
+immense magazines and 600 guns on the ramparts garrisoned by 16,000
+troops, surrendered after a few hours’ partial bombardment. Stettin, a
+first-class fortress mounting 150 guns, with a garrison of 6,000 men,
+surrendered without firing a shot. The strong fortress of Cüstrin on
+the Oder, with 4,000 men in garrison and 90 cannon on the ramparts,
+surrendered, also without firing a shot, to a solitary French infantry
+regiment with four guns. The fortress of Spandau, garrisoned by 6,000
+men, hauled down its flag and opened its gates to a squadron of French
+hussars, no other French troops being within many miles, bluffed into
+surrender. Within twelve days of Jena, Napoleon had made his entry as a
+conqueror into Berlin, and the Prussian Army had ceased to exist. “We
+have arrived in Potsdam and Berlin,” announced Napoleon in a Bulletin
+to the Grand Army, “sooner than the renown of our victories! We have
+made 60,000 prisoners, taken 65 standards, including those of the Royal
+Guard, 600 pieces of cannon, 3 fortresses, 20 generals, half of our
+army having to regret that they have not had an opportunity of firing a
+shot. All the Prussian provinces from the Elbe to the Oder are in our
+hands.” Before the end of the year, in little more than three months
+from the firing of the first shot, a total of 100,000 prisoners, 4,000
+cannon, 6 first-class fortresses, and many smaller ones, were in the
+hands of the victors.
+
+[Sidenote: RUIN, SWIFT AND IRREPARABLE]
+
+Never had the world witnessed such an overthrow in war, so complete
+and appalling a catastrophe. Two battles sufficed to prostrate Prussia
+and annihilate the model army of Frederick the Great: the twin battles
+of Jena and Auerstadt, both fought, as has been said, on the same
+day, October 14, and within ten miles of one another. Jena was fought
+under Napoleon’s own eye; Auerstadt by Marshal Davout, practically
+single-handed, with his one army corps confronting the King and
+Blücher with the main Prussian army. The Prussian generals indeed
+gave themselves into Napoleon’s hands at the outset. They separated
+their main army into two bodies out of touch with each other, in the
+immediate presence of the enemy. Ruin, swift and irreparable, was the
+penalty. At Jena, Prince Hohenlohe’s army was flung roughly back and
+dashed to pieces, its scattered remnants flying in wild disorder. At
+Auerstadt, Davout defeated numbers nearly double his own, through the
+confused tactics of the Prussian generals. Immediately after that
+came on the _débâcle_. The Prussian Auerstadt army was falling back,
+disheartened and demoralised, but still in fair military formation to
+a large extent, when, all of a sudden, not having had up to then the
+least inkling of what had happened at Jena, the retreating troops came
+upon the shattered fragments of Hohenlohe’s battalions, streaming in
+wild confusion across their path; masses of fugitives running for
+their lives in frantic panic before the sabres of Murat’s pursuing
+cavalry. That ended everything for the Prussian army in five minutes.
+The sight of their fugitive comrades struck confusion and sheer fright
+into the retreating columns from Auerstadt. All order was instantly
+lost: the soldiers threw away their arms and spread over the country in
+headlong rout. And there was no means of stopping it. In their blind
+self-confidence the Prussian generals had made no arrangements in
+the event of a reverse. No line of retreat had been arranged for, no
+rallying-point had been thought of. “The disaster of a single day made
+an end of the Prussian army as a force capable of meeting the enemy in
+the field.”
+
+For the Eagles it was a day of adventures on both battlefields. Swiftly
+alternating rushes forward, the Eagles showing the way at the head
+of their regiments at one moment; hasty halts to form in rallying
+squares, the Eagles in the midst, the next moment, to check the
+incessant Prussian cavalry counter-charges--that was what the fighting
+on the French side was like, all through the day, at both Jena and
+Auerstadt. At one time the Eagles were leading forward charging lines
+of exultantly cheering men, firing fast and racing forward at the _pas
+de charge_; immediately afterwards they were standing fast, each the
+centre of a mass of breathless and excited soldiers, surging round and
+closing up to form square, with bristling bayonets levelled on every
+side, to hold the ground they had won against the charging squadrons of
+Prussian horsemen that came at them, thundering down impetuously at the
+gallop.
+
+[Sidenote: “LEAD OUT YOUR EAGLE!”]
+
+“I want to see the Eagles well to the front to-day!” said Napoleon
+to several regiments in turn, as he rode at early dawn along the
+lines of Marshal Soult’s two foremost divisions who were to open the
+attack at Jena. To them the task had been appointed to push forward
+in advance, and hold the exits from the narrow defiles through which
+the French troops had to pass, before reaching the Prussians on the
+high ground beyond, in order to give time to the main army, following
+close in rear, to deploy and form in battle order. “Lead out your
+Eagle, Sixty-fourth!” Napoleon said to one of the regiments told off
+to go forward in the forefront of all. “I wish to-day to see the Eagle
+of the Sixty-fourth lead the battle on the field of honour!” How that
+Eagle led its regiment, how those who fought under it did their duty,
+the prized honour of special mention in the Jena Bulletin of the Grand
+Army, and a shower of crosses of the Legion of Honour, distributed
+among all ranks, bore testimony. Five times did the Eagle of the 34th,
+the regiment fighting next to the 64th, lead a charge, each charge
+crossing bayonets with the enemy, twice in hand-to-hand fight with the
+picked corps of the Prussian Grenadiers.
+
+It was on the battlefield of Jena that Marshal Ney won his historic
+sobriquet of “The Bravest of the Brave.” He personally led forward his
+attack, with, at either side of him, the Eagles of the 18th of the
+Line, the 32nd, and the 96th. Carried away by his impetuous valour,
+soon after the opening of the battle, Ney made his attack with only at
+hand the three regiments of his First Division. The other two divisions
+of Ney’s corps had not yet reached the field. A regiment of cuirassiers
+headed the column, and at their first charge captured 13 Prussian guns;
+but the Prussian cavalry, charging back at once to recover the guns,
+overpowered the cuirassiers.
+
+“The Prussian cavalry broke the French horse, and enveloped the
+infantry in such numbers as would inevitably have proved fatal to
+less resolute troops; but the brave marshal instantly formed his men
+into squares, threw himself into one of them, and there maintained
+the combat by a rolling fire on all sides, till Napoleon, who saw his
+danger, sent several regiments of horse, under Bertrand, who disengaged
+him from his perilous situation.”
+
+Ney’s other troops then joined the marshal, coming up with their Eagles
+gleaming through the battle-smoke: the Eagles of the 39th and the
+69th, of the 76th, the 27th, and the 59th. Ney, extricated from his
+difficulties, went on again at once. “With intrepid step he ascended
+the hill, and, after a sharp conflict, stormed the important village
+of Vierzehn-Heiligen, in the centre of the Prussian position. In vain
+Hohenlohe formed the flower of his troops to regain the post; in
+vain these brave men advanced in parade order, and with unshrinking
+firmness, through a storm of musketry and grape; the troops of Lannes
+came up to Ney’s support, and the French established themselves in such
+strength in the village as to render all subsequent attempts for its
+recapture abortive.”
+
+[Sidenote: LET THEM COME ON!]
+
+This was the spirit in which, at Jena, Ney’s men fought under the
+Eagles. One instance will suffice. The 76th of the Line, after the
+village of Vierzehn-Heiligen had been taken, were in the act of
+advancing across the open to a fresh attack, when a charge of Prussian
+cavalry swept fiercely down on them. The regiment formed in square,
+each battalion rallying round its Eagle, held up aloft for all to
+gather round. The Prussians had come up suddenly. They were within
+150 yards before the 76th were ready. Then the 76th were ordered to
+“present” and fire. Instead of doing that, the men, as if moved by one
+common impulse, took off their shakos, stuck them on their bayonets,
+and waved them in the air, with defiant cheers of “Vive l’Empereur!”
+“Donnez feu, mes enfants! Donnez feu!” (“Fire, men, fire!”) shouted out
+their colonel, Lannier, anxious lest the enemy should get too near.
+“We have time: at fifteen paces, Colonel; wait and see!” came back in
+answer from the ranks. They did wait, and, at just fifteen paces, fired
+a crashing volley which so staggered the Prussians that, leaving half
+their men on the ground, they turned and galloped back.
+
+The regiments of Lannes’ corps, with the fiery marshal cantering at
+their head and waving them on, cocked hat in hand, entered the battle
+with drums beating and the Eagles proudly displayed in the centre of
+the leading lines.
+
+[Sidenote: “HERE IS THE COU-COU!”]
+
+One regiment lost 28 officers and 400 men. It had made good its first
+attack and was advancing to a second, when it was charged in the open
+by the Prussian cavalry, while in the act of forming square. It all
+but lost its Eagle. The Eagle-bearer was cut down, and the Eagle was
+broken from its staff in the trampling tumult of horsemen intermingled
+with infantry, savagely fighting with their bayonets. A soldier saved
+the Eagle, and in the hurry of the moment stuffed it into the pocket
+of his long overcoat. Then he went on fighting. Apparently the man had
+no time or opportunity to think of the Eagle again. The regiment was
+re-forming towards the close of the battle, when Napoleon himself,
+riding across the ground near them, with his quick glance, missed the
+Eagle. He cantered up to the spot, and, on being told by an officer
+that he did not know where it was, angrily accused the men of having
+lost their Eagle on the field. He began upbraiding them indignantly:
+“What is this? Where is your Eagle? You have brought disgrace on the
+Army by losing your Eagle!” Those were his opening words. He was rating
+the men angrily, when he was abruptly interrupted by a voice from the
+ranks. “No, your Majesty, no! they did not get it: they only got a
+piece of the bâton! Here is the Cou-cou! I put it in my pocket!” The
+soldier drew out the Eagle as he spoke and held it up. There was a
+loud outburst of laughter from the soldiers at the unexpected turn of
+events, amid which Napoleon, without a word more, turned and rode off
+elsewhere.
+
+At Auerstadt, where 30,000 French faced and defeated 60,000 Prussians,
+the fighting was even fiercer than at Jena. Recklessly the Prussian
+horsemen, led in person by the dauntless Blücher, repeatedly charged
+down on the French, who formed in square everywhere to beat them back,
+They did so at all points, and the Prussians only wrecked themselves
+beyond recovery by their efforts. In vain did the Prussian cavalry, as
+at Jena, gallop up to the French bayonets again and again. “In vain
+these gallant cavaliers, with headlong fury, drove their steeds up to
+the very muzzles of the French muskets. In vain they rode round and
+enveloped their squares: ceaseless was the rolling fire which issued
+from those flaming walls: impenetrable the hedge of bayonets which, the
+front rank kneeling, presented to their advances.” Erect in the centre
+of each French battalion square glittered its Eagle, raised on high
+defiantly above the smoke as the volleys flashed out all round.
+
+Marshal Davout was seen at every point wherever the regiments were
+hardest pressed. From square to square the marshal galloped, as
+opportunity offered in the intervals of the Prussian attacks, “his face
+begrimed with sweat and powder-smoke, his spectacles gone,[11] his bald
+head bleeding from a wound, his uniform torn, a piece of his cocked hat
+shot away,” to exhort the men to stand fast and hold their ground. To
+one regiment he called out, as he reined up beside its square: “Their
+Great Frederick said that God gave the victory to the big battalions.
+He lied! It’s the stubborn soldiers who win battles; that’s you and
+your general to-day!” Davout personally brought up support at one
+point to rescue a sorely pressed division of four regiments, General
+Gudin’s,[12] holding the village of Herrenhausen, on the right of the
+battlefield; a post of vital importance to the fate of the day. Taken
+by a brilliant dash forward early in the battle, the village was held
+to the last, in spite of the utmost endeavours of the Prussians to
+regain it.
+
+[Illustration: MARSHAL DAVOUT.]
+
+[Sidenote: AT BAY BEHIND A BARRICADE]
+
+The French kept the post at the cost of half their numbers. One
+regiment, the 85th, on the side of the village fronting the Prussians,
+lost two-thirds of its men and was forced back and compelled to abandon
+the outskirts. It kept the Prussians at bay, however, within the
+village, behind a barricade of overturned carts, farm implements, and
+cottage furniture heaped together. Close behind the firing line across
+the village street the Eagle-bearer took his stand, amidst a hail of
+bullets, mounted on a wheelbarrow and brandishing the Eagle and calling
+on the men to stand firm and fire low.
+
+Marshal Davout brought up his First Division of five regiments to
+rescue Gudin, heading them sword in hand as he galloped forward. In
+doing so he received his wound and had a narrow escape of his life.
+“One bullet went through the marshal’s hat just above the cockade.”[13]
+
+The 111th of the Line, of Davout’s Third Division, had three
+Eagle-bearers shot down in succession, a fresh officer coming forward
+to carry the Eagle as his predecessor fell. All the drummer-lads of the
+regiment were killed, whereupon Drum-Major Mauser, dropping his staff,
+picked up a drum and beat it as the regiment advanced in its final
+charge. He ran forward close beside the Eagle until he in turn fell
+shot dead. This was in storming the village of Spielberg, nearly at
+the close of the battle.
+
+“The corps of Marshal Davout performed prodigies,” wrote Napoleon in
+the Fourth Bulletin of the campaign, commending with warmth “the rare
+intrepidity of the brave corps.” He ordered 500 crosses of the Legion
+of Honour to be distributed in Davout’s corps, directing that when the
+army reached Berlin, Davout and the Third Corps should take precedence,
+and their Eagles lead the triumphal entry through the streets of the
+Prussian capital. At a special review of Davout’s corps, calling
+the marshal and his generals round him, he declared his unbounded
+admiration of the feat of arms they had achieved. “Sire,” replied
+Davout, deeply moved at Napoleon’s words, “the soldiers of the Third
+Corps will always be to you what the Tenth Legion was to Caesar.”
+
+At the attack on Halle, three days after Jena, the 32nd of the Line,
+near the Eagle of which regiment Ney had ridden at Jena, distinguished
+themselves brilliantly. The Prussian Reserve Army Corps was holding
+Halle and making a gallant effort in a rearguard fight to safeguard
+the passage there over the river Saale. Led by the commander of Ney’s
+First Division, General Dupont, in person, they stormed the bridge in
+the face of a tremendous fire of grape and case shot. Then, backed up
+by their comrades in Ney’s First Division, the 18th and 96th and 9th
+Light Infantry, they fought their way through the city and, breaking
+open the gates, stormed the heights beyond, foremost throughout in the
+attack. Four times the Eagle-bearer of the 32nd was shot down: each
+time a fresh officer sprang forward to lead the regiment on. The 97th
+of the Line, while fighting their way through the streets of Halle at
+another point, found the Prussian cannon mounted at a barricade too
+deadly to face in the open, and the regiment recoiled in confusion.
+Taking the Eagle from the Eagle-bearer, Colonel Barrois called forward
+the grenadier company. Leading them on himself on horseback, holding up
+the Eagle with his right hand, he went straight at the barricade, which
+was stormed without touching a trigger.
+
+[Sidenote: ACROSS A CONQUERED LAND]
+
+Thenceforward there was only left for the Eagles to choose the slain;
+to parade in triumph across a conquered land. “Veni, Vidi, Vici,”
+sums up the story of the after-events of the war for the Eagles of
+Napoleon. The army of the great Frederick committed suicide after Jena.
+Its resistance collapsed: the army that had gone forth in September
+to cross the Rhine and dictate peace at the gates of Paris had ceased
+to exist within six weeks. How completely indeed the _moral_ of the
+Prussians had been shattered, this story, from a report from Marshal
+Lannes to Napoleon, serves to show. “Three hussars,” related Lannes,
+“having lost their way towards Grätz, found themselves in the midst of
+an enemy’s squadron. They boldly drew their carbines and, levelling
+them at the enemy, called out that the Prussians were surrounded, and
+must surrender at discretion. The Prussians obeyed. The commander of
+the squadron, without apparently a thought of resistance, ordered
+his men to dismount, and they surrendered their arms to those three
+hussars, who brought them all in prisoners of war.”
+
+General Lassalle, with a handful of hussars, as has been said,
+captured the fortress of Stettin, with 150 guns on its walls and a
+garrison of 6,000 men, by sheer effrontery. He rode up to the main
+gate and demanded the surrender within five minutes; and the governor
+capitulated on the spot. “If your hussars take strong fortresses like
+that,” wrote Napoleon to Murat, on hearing the news, “I have nothing
+to do but break up my artillery and discharge my engineers.” Prince
+Hohenlohe with 14,000 men and 50 guns, his troops including the Royal
+Prussian Guard and six regiments of Guard cavalry, laid down their
+arms at Prentzlau. A few miles away, 8,000 more Prussians surrendered
+on the same day to a French brigade of dragoons. The unfortunates
+were remnants of the troops beaten at Jena, and had been relentlessly
+pursued for ten days.
+
+The 7th Hussars forwarded to Napoleon as their spoils from a three
+days’ chase, 7 Prussian cavalry standards; those of the Anspach and
+Bayreuth Dragoons; the Queen of Prussia’s regiment; and 4 standards
+of the Light Cavalry of the Guard. Marshal Lannes sent Napoleon 40
+Prussian standards taken between Jena and Berlin. Bernadotte and Soult
+presented 82 more trophies, the spoils of Blücher’s army, forced to
+surrender at Lübeck after a forlorn-hope fight in the course of which
+the city was stormed.
+
+[Sidenote: “THE FINEST FEAT OF ARMS”]
+
+Marshal Ney took the fortress of Magdeburg without having a single
+siege-gun, and with only 11,000 men at hand to deal with 24,000 in the
+garrison and 700 guns on the ramparts, some of these being the heaviest
+artillery of the time. It was perhaps the most surprising event of the
+war. The taking of Magdeburg, wrote Junot, “is the finest feat of arms
+that has illustrated this campaign.” Ney had been ordered to blockade
+Magdeburg until a sufficient army was available for the siege of the
+fortress, which Napoleon expected would be a long and difficult affair.
+But so tedious a task as a blockade was not at all to Ney’s taste.
+To hasten matters he sent for half a dozen mortars, taken at Erfurt,
+and began throwing shells into the suburbs on the side nearest him.
+The bombardment caused a scare among the townsfolk. Panic-stricken at
+seeing their houses set on fire and destroyed by the bursting shells,
+they hastened to General Kleist, the governor of Magdeburg, an elderly
+and nervous old gentleman of between seventy and eighty years of
+age, and implored him to ask terms of the French marshal. Dismayed
+himself at the prospect of a siege, with disorder rampant among the
+military--nearly half the garrison was made up of fragments of fugitive
+regiments from Jena who had fled to Magdeburg for shelter from the
+pursuing French--Kleist, losing his nerve in the face of the alarming
+situation, agreed to negotiate for terms. Ney’s reply was a demand for
+instant surrender, whereupon the wretched governor, although he had
+more than enough good troops at disposal, without counting the Jena
+fugitives, to have made a stubborn defence, tamely hoisted the white
+flag.
+
+The march out of the garrison of Magdeburg was a repetition of the
+Austrian humiliation of Ulm on a lesser scale. The standards of the
+Black Eagle in their turn had at Magdeburg publicly to acknowledge
+defeat before the Eagles of Napoleon.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GARRISON LAYS DOWN ARMS]
+
+Ney drew up his 11,000 men in a great hollow square outside the Ulrich
+gate of the fortress. His troops were drawn up along three sides of
+the square; the fourth side, that nearest the city, being left open.
+In front of the regiments stood their Eagles, all paraded as at Ulm,
+the Eagle-guards beside them, and the regimental officers standing in
+line with their swords at the carry. The Prussians marched out and, to
+the music of the French bands, passed in procession along the three
+inner sides of the square, and in front of Marshal Ney and his staff.
+The miserable Kleist led them, and then took his stand beside Ney, to
+answer the marshal’s questions as to who and what the various regiments
+were, as each set of downcast Prussians trailed past. They tramped by,
+with their muskets on their shoulders unloaded and without bayonets,
+and with their colours furled. The hapless prisoners, after they had
+defiled past, were at once marched away under escort on the road to
+Mayence. Twenty generals, 800 other officers, 22,000 infantry, and
+2,000 artillerymen, with 59 standards, underwent the humiliation of the
+defilade.[14] There were several painful scenes at the laying down of
+the arms. “Their soldiers openly insulted their officers,” describes
+one of the French lookers-on. “Most of them looked terribly ashamed of
+themselves; the faces of not a few were streaming with tears.”
+
+At Magdeburg, as in the other surrenders elsewhere, it was not the
+personal courage of the officers and soldiers that was wanting--there
+were men by thousands in the various garrisons ready to give their
+lives for the honour of their country; it was the generals in command
+whose nerve lacked. The generals were men past their prime, and mostly
+physically incapable of enduring hardships. They had been appointed to
+their posts, in accordance with the system in vogue in Prussia, for the
+sake of the emoluments.
+
+“The overthrow of Jena,” to use the words of a modern writer, “had been
+caused by faults of generalship, and cast no stain upon the courage
+of the officers; the surrender of the Prussian fortresses, which
+began on the day when the French entered Berlin, attached the utmost
+personal disgrace to their commanders. Even after the destruction of
+the army in the field, Prussia’s situation would not have been hopeless
+if the commanders of the fortresses had acted on the ordinary rules
+of military duty. Magdeburg and the strongholds upon the Oder were
+sufficiently armed and provisioned to detain the entire French army,
+and to give time to the King to collect upon the Vistula a force as
+numerous as that which he had lost. But whatever is weakest in human
+nature--old age, fear, and credulity--seemed to have been placed at the
+head of the Prussian defences.” Küstrin on the Oder, “in full order for
+a long siege, was surrendered by the older officers, amidst the curses
+of the subalterns and the common soldiers: the artillerymen had to be
+dragged from their guns by force.”
+
+At Magdeburg, indeed, before the march out, the younger officers of the
+garrison mobbed General Kleist, hooting at him and cursing him to his
+face; some of them, further, being with difficulty stopped from acts of
+personal violence.
+
+There yet remained one day more for the Eagles. The triumphal parade of
+the victorious Eagles through Berlin was the crowning humiliation that
+Napoleon imposed on vanquished Prussia.
+
+[Sidenote: MARSHAL DAVOUT IN BERLIN]
+
+Davout’s corps, as Napoleon had promised, marched through the Prussian
+capital first of all. The marshal was waited on as he entered by the
+Burgomeister and civic authorities, humbly bowing before him, and
+offering in token of submission the keys of Berlin. The offer, however,
+was declined. “You must present them later,” was the reply; “they
+belong to a greater than I!” After marching through Berlin, Davout
+camped a mile beyond the city, posting his artillery “in position as
+for war, pointed towards the place as in readiness to bombard it.” The
+soldiers were then allowed to go about Berlin in parties. They behaved
+very quietly, and made eager sightseers, we are told. The shops,
+which had been closed during the march through, reopened later, and
+the people went about the streets as usual, “mortified and subdued in
+demeanour, but apparently very curious to see what they could of the
+French officers.”
+
+Augereau’s corps, and then those of Soult, Bernadotte, and Ney made
+their triumphal entry and march through Berlin in turn, on different
+days later on, bands playing and Eagles displayed at the head of the
+regiments--the people turning out on each occasion in crowds to line
+the streets and gaze at the show, “expressing great surprise at the
+small size of our men and the youth of most of the officers.” Marshal
+Ney’s corps brought with them their fifty-nine trophies from Magdeburg,
+and, after parading them through the streets of Berlin, ceremoniously
+presented them to Napoleon in public, in front of the statue of
+Frederick the Great.
+
+Napoleon himself made his triumphal entry into Berlin on October 28,
+three days after Davout’s march through. He rode from Charlottenburg
+through the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter-den-Linden to the Royal
+Palace, at the head of the Old Guard and six thousand cuirassiers in
+gleaming mail. Squadrons of Gendarmerie d’Elite and Chasseurs of the
+Guard and the Horse Grenadiers, in their huge bear-skins, led the long
+procession, all in _grande tenue_, with their bands playing and the
+Eagles glittering in the brilliant sunshine of a perfect autumn day.
+
+Napoleon came next, “riding by himself, twenty paces in front of the
+staff, with impassive face and a stern expression,” passing amid dense
+silent crowds, “the men all wearing black, as in mourning; the women
+mostly with handkerchiefs to their eyes.” The people lined both sides
+of the roadway, and filled the windows of all the houses overlooking
+the route. All Berlin, young and old, was in the streets that day,
+staring at the spectacle in mute silence, looking on dumbly, pale-faced
+and miserable of aspect. Not a mutter of abuse was heard, not the least
+sign was apparent of the deadly hatred to their conqueror that one and
+all felt. With rage and despair in their hearts, with compressed lips
+and clenched fists at their sides, the men watched the splendid array
+sweep proudly past them in all the insolent pomp of victorious war.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON RIDES THROUGH]
+
+For once, on that historic occasion, Napoleon discarded his customary
+wear of the green undress uniform of his pet corps, the Chasseurs of
+the Guard. He entered Berlin as the head of a conquering army, wearing
+the full-dress uniform of a French general, crimson plumed cocked hat
+with blue and white aigrette, blue coat heavily embroidered with gold,
+and with glittering bullion epaulettes, and the blue and gold sash of
+a general round his waist. Four marshals, Berthier, Lannes, Davout,
+and Augereau, riding abreast, followed Napoleon, immediately in front
+of the Imperial Staff, a cavalcade of a hundred and more brilliantly
+decorated officers, all in their most gorgeous parade uniforms, in
+celebration of the day. The keys of the city were presented to the
+conqueror, and accepted by him, as Napoleon passed through the
+Brandenburg Gate. Ten thousand infantry of the Old Guard, in a vast
+solid column of glistening bayonets, marched, twenty abreast, in rear
+of the staff. Their famous band playing triumphantly, with the Eagle
+of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard above its flag of crimson silk
+and gold, heading the veterans. They also were all in the full-dress
+uniform they wore on gala-day parades before the Tuileries. By
+Napoleon’s special order, the Old Guard on all campaigns carried in
+their knapsacks their full-dress uniform, specially for donning on
+occasions such as that at Berlin.
+
+But the cup of humiliation for the miserable citizens of the Prussian
+capital was not yet full. They had yet another military spectacle with
+a significance of its own to witness; one the deep humiliation of which
+they felt more bitterly even than Napoleon’s triumphant ride in person
+through their streets. The citizens of Berlin had to look on their own
+officers of the Royal Prussian Guard being led in procession through
+their midst under the armed escort of Napoleon’s grenadiers. That was
+Napoleon’s way of settling accounts for that August night of wanton
+insult to France, for the sharpening of the sword-blades on the steps
+of the French Embassy.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PRISONERS FARMED OUT]
+
+Nor, too, did Napoleon spare the Prussian prisoners of the rank and
+file. Writing from Berlin to the Minister of the Interior in Paris,
+he gave directions that the Prussian captives should be made use of
+as hewers of wood and drawers of water for their conquerors. They
+were to be farmed out to municipalities and district councils in the
+Departments. “Their services should be turned to account at a trifling
+expense in the way of wages for the benefit of our manufacturers and
+cultivators and replace our conscripts called to serve in the ranks of
+the Grand Army.”
+
+Napoleon stayed in Berlin for four weeks, while the marshals were
+leading the Eagles through Eastern Prussia towards the Polish frontier.
+Russia had taken up the cause of her defeated neighbour, and the armies
+of the Czar were on the move to rescue what was left of the Prussian
+army. Less than 15,000 men were all that remained in the field to show
+fight, of 200,000 soldiers who, not two months before, had been on the
+march against France in full anticipation of victory.
+
+In the Royal Palace of Berlin Napoleon received with elaborate
+ceremony the deputation of the French Senate sent from Paris specially
+to congratulate the victor of Jena in the enemy’s capital. He took
+advantage of the unique occasion for the formal presentation and
+handing over to their charge, for conveyance to Paris, of the trophies
+of the war--340 Prussian battle-flags and standards.[15] Forty of the
+trophies presented to the Senate on that day at Berlin are now among
+the array of trophies grouped round Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides.
+
+Napoleon handed over to the charge of the deputation at the same time,
+for transfer to the Invalides, his own personal spoil--the sword of
+Frederick the Great. It was removed--all the world knows the story of
+the unpardonable outrage--by Napoleon’s own hand from its resting-place
+on the royal tomb at Potsdam. “I would rather have this,” he said to
+the officers beside him in the royal vault as he took possession of the
+sword, “than twenty millions. I shall send it to my old soldiers who
+fought against Frederick in the campaign in Hanover. I will present it
+to the Governor of the Invalides, who will guard it as a testimonial of
+the victories of the Grand Army and the vengeance that it has wreaked
+for the disaster of Rosbach. My veterans will be pleased to see the
+sword of the man who defeated them at Rosbach!”
+
+[Sidenote: FREDERICK THE GREAT’S SWORD]
+
+The trophies started for France forthwith under military escort, and
+Paris went mad with exultation at the sight of them. On the day of the
+State Procession which escorted the trophies from the Tuileries to
+the Invalides it proved almost impossible to keep back the enormous
+crowds that thronged the streets along the route, in spite of cordons
+of gendarmerie and regiments of dragoons. Deputations of veterans and
+National Guards, with the Eagles of the Departmental Legions, led the
+way. Then came Imperial carriages with exalted official personages.
+The trophies had their place next, displayed in clusters of flags all
+round a gigantic triumphal car. Marshal Moncey, the acting Governor
+of Paris, rode a few paces behind the car of Prussian standards,
+holding up the trophy of trophies before the eyes of the wildly
+cheering onlookers--Frederick the Great’s sword. A gaily attired
+train of generals and staff officers attended the marshal. The rear
+of the procession was brought up by the battalions of the Guard of
+Paris, their Eagles being borne amid rows of gleaming bayonets. Salvos
+of artillery from the Triumphal Battery greeted the arrival of the
+trophies at the Invalides, where the veterans awaited them, drawn up on
+parade before the Gate of Honour. As Napoleon had specially directed,
+the Hanoverian War veterans of the Invalides met and escorted Marshal
+Moncey to the chapel at the head of other specially nominated veterans,
+who bore, marching in procession, the Prussian trophy-standards. The
+trophies were deposited with an elaborate display of ceremonial in
+front of the High Altar, after which Fontanes, the Public Orator of
+the Empire, delivered an address full of glowingly eloquent passages
+on the glorious achievements of the Grand Army and the “resplendent
+magnificence of the leader who had led the Eagles to surpassing
+triumphs!”
+
+
+THE TWELVE LOST EAGLES OF EYLAU
+
+Napoleon passed from the victorious fields of Prussia to the rough
+experiences of the Eylau and Friedland campaigns, which followed as the
+sequel to Jena on the plains of the Polish frontier. The Eagles there
+had to undergo under fire vicissitudes of fortune that were a foretaste
+of the fate in store for some of them later on, at the hands of the
+same enemy, in the Moscow campaign. No fewer than fourteen of the
+Eagles borne in triumph through Berlin after Jena were on view within a
+twelvemonth as spoils of war in the Kazan Cathedral at St. Petersburg.
+
+The Eagle of Marshal Ney’s favourite regiment in the battle-days
+of the Ulm campaign, the 9th Light Infantry, was the first to meet
+adventures in the Polish War. It was on the occasion of the surprise
+of Bernadotte’s army corps, at Möhringen near the Vistula, in the last
+week of January 1807. The Grand Army was lying in winter quarters to
+the north of Warsaw, awaiting the reopening of the campaign in the
+early spring, when the Russian army, breaking up unexpectedly from its
+cantonments beyond the Vistula in the depth of winter, made a dash at
+Bernadotte’s outlying troops, posted by themselves at some distance
+from the main army and scattered in detachments over a wide tract of
+country for reasons of food-supply. Bernadotte only got news of the
+enemy’s approach just in time; practically at the eleventh hour. He
+was rapidly concentrating his corps at Möhringen, but barely half his
+troops had been able to reach the point of danger when the Russians
+struck their blow. He was able with the troops nearest at hand to avert
+destruction, but the escape was a narrow one and his losses were very
+heavy, all his baggage falling into the hands of the enemy. Fortunately
+for the French the Russian advanced guard attacked prematurely and was
+beaten back, after which Bernadotte made good his retreat to a safer
+neighbourhood.
+
+[Sidenote: FOUR TIMES TAKEN AND RETAKEN]
+
+The 9th Light Infantry were in the forefront of the fighting, which
+was at the closest quarters, the soldiers on both sides meeting man
+to man. Four Eagle-bearers of the 9th fell, one after the other. Four
+times the Eagle was taken by the Russians and recaptured at the point
+of the bayonet. A fifth time the Eagle-bearer went down, and on his
+fall this time the Eagle disappeared, while the 9th were driven back,
+broken and in disorder. They were quickly rallied again, however, and
+led once more to the charge, “going forward to the combat with the
+fury of despair.” This time their impetuous onset forced the Russians
+to give ground. Advancing with shouts of victory, they stormed the
+village of Psarrefelden, immediately in front of them, and there
+seized part of a Russian ammunition train. While searching for fresh
+cartridges in one of the enemy’s ammunition wagons to replenish their
+empty cartouche-boxes an officer, to his surprise, came upon the lost
+Eagle. It had been broken from its staff in the last fight round it,
+and its Russian captor, probably having enough to do to look after
+himself without carrying it about, had apparently thrust it hastily
+into the ammunition wagon on top of the cartridges. At any rate there
+the Eagle of the 9th Light Infantry was found, and so it was regained.
+The broken staff and flag were missing and were never seen again, but
+the all-important Eagle had been recovered. It was hurriedly mounted on
+a hop-pole, found leaning against a peasant’s hut near by, which was
+improvised for a staff, and on that the Eagle was carried to the close
+of the fighting that day, after which the 9th retreated with the rest
+of Bernadotte’s corps.
+
+Napoleon specially decorated the lieutenant who recovered the Eagle,
+and who also had led more than one of the charges to rescue it in the
+earlier fighting. He gave him the cross of the Legion of Honour with
+a money grant. He further recorded the recovery of the Eagle--though
+without mentioning how it was got back--in the 55th Bulletin of the
+Grand Army, dated Warsaw, January 29, 1807:
+
+“The Eagle of the 9th Light Infantry was taken by the enemy, but,
+realising the deep disgrace with which their brave regiment would be
+covered for ever, and from which neither victory nor the glory acquired
+in a hundred combats could have removed the stigma, the soldiers,
+animated with an inconceivable ardour, precipitated themselves on the
+enemy and routed them and recovered their Eagle.”
+
+So Napoleon wrote history.
+
+[Sidenote: ON THE FIRST DAY AT EYLAU]
+
+Two Eagles met their fate in the first day’s fighting at Eylau--in the
+preliminary combat on February 7, which formed the opening phase of the
+terrific encounter next day. At Eylau--a small township some twenty-two
+miles to the south of Königsburg--Napoleon in person commanded with
+80,000 men in the field, and met with his first serious check in a
+European war. In following up the Russian rearguard on the afternoon of
+the 7th, as it fell slowly back to rejoin its main body, drawn up in
+position on the farther side of Eylau, on ground chosen beforehand by
+the Russian leader for making a stand, two of Napoleon’s battalions,
+while pressing hotly forward after the enemy over the open plain,
+some two miles from Eylau, were overpowered and cut to pieces. They
+had charged and were driving in the nearest Russians to them, when a
+Russian cavalry regiment, the St. Petersburg Dragoons, unexpectedly
+came on the scene. Sweeping round amidst the tumult of the fighting,
+the dragoons rode into them on the flank. The two battalions were
+slaughtered almost to a man within five minutes, before help could
+get to them, and their Eagles were snatched up and borne away. It was
+an act of expiation for the St. Petersburg Dragoons. On the previous
+day Murat’s pursuing hussars had charged and broken them, putting
+them to flight, and in a wild panic they had ridden over one of their
+own regiments, trampling their comrades down, with loss of life. To
+retrieve their character the St. Petersburg Dragoons now went savagely
+at the two French battalions, riding them down with reckless daring and
+relentless fury, giving no quarter. Their capture of two of Napoleon’s
+Eagles in one charge, the taking of two Eagles by a single regiment,
+stands on its own account as a unique achievement.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Plan of the Battlefield of EYLAU]
+
+Eylau--the historic battle of February 8, 1807--was fought in the depth
+of winter; in the midst of a flat expanse of a desolate snow-plain
+and ice-bound marshes; under dreary lowering skies of leaden grey;
+amid howling gusts of piercing wind, with driving snow-storms sweeping
+intermittently across the field of battle. A hundred and fifty thousand
+men on both sides faced each other at the break of day, after passing
+the night with their outposts within shot of one another, the soldiers
+all lying in an open bivouac on the snow, round their watch-fires,
+wrapped up in their cloaks, the only shelter from the bitter cold. They
+fronted each other in the grey dawn “within half-cannon shot, their
+immense masses distributed in dense columns over a space in breadth
+less than four miles. Between them lay the field of battle, a wide
+stretch of unenclosed ground, rising on the Russian side to a range
+of small hills. All over the plain, ponds and marshes intersected the
+ground, but far and wide all was now covered over with ice and deep
+snow.”
+
+Napoleon began the battle with a fierce cannonade, opening a terrific
+fire all along the line with no fewer than 350 guns. The Russians
+replied at once, firing back even more furiously and with yet more
+guns. For almost an hour nearly 800 cannon belched forth shot and shell
+on either side; an artillery duel perhaps unparalleled in war. Then, in
+the midst of the cannonade, Napoleon launched his first attack. Fifteen
+thousand men of Augereau’s corps moved out from the centre of the
+French line to storm the Russian position. They went forward, massed in
+two immense columns, with, in support, a third column of one of Soult’s
+divisions.
+
+[Sidenote: GOING FORWARD TO THEIR DOOM]
+
+They went forward to their doom: to meet disaster, swift, terrible,
+overwhelming, and to leave two of their Eagles in the hands of the
+enemy as mementos of their fate. Yet they were not given up; neither
+of those Eagles was surrendered. They remained on the field amid the
+dead; left behind because there was not a man living of their regiments
+to defend them. They lay where they fell, surrounded by the soldiers
+who had died in their defence; lying on the snow for the Cossacks to
+pick up and carry away. They were the Eagles of the 14th and the 24th
+of the Line.
+
+The Russians turned their guns on Augereau’s corps directly it
+commenced its advance; it was sheer massacre for the French, as the
+fierce tornado of cannon-balls crashed into the thick of the densely
+massed columns. Whole companies were swept away, mowed down, on every
+side. “Within a quarter of an hour, half of the corps were struck
+down.” The rest, though, with stolid endurance, held firmly on their
+way. The soldiers went doggedly on; only halting for a moment now and
+again to close up their shattered ranks. At that moment, as they were
+nearing the Russian position, a furious snow-storm burst over the
+battlefield, the snow blowing right in the faces of the French. “It
+was impossible,” one of the survivors told, “to see anything at all in
+front; we could at times barely see a foot before us.” All, in spite
+of that, however, laboured bravely to get forward; without wavering,
+and regardless of the merciless fire of the Russian guns, which never
+ceased for one moment.
+
+[Sidenote: OVERWHELMED IN A SNOWSTORM]
+
+Then, as the snow-blinded soldiers struggled on, when the storm of
+whirling snow was at its worst, all in an instant the catastrophe
+happened. Without warning, coming from nowhere, as it seemed, an
+enormous mass of Russian horse, dragoons and Cossacks, charged
+suddenly, amid an infernal din of furious shouting, into them. “So
+thick was the snow-storm, and so unexpected the onset, that the
+assailants were only a few feet off, and the long lances of the
+Cossacks almost touching the French infantry when they were first
+discerned.” The Russians swept down on all sides of the two divisions;
+charging them in front and flanks and rear at once, the dragoons
+sabring them right and left, the Cossacks stabbing at them with their
+long eighteen-foot lances.
+
+“The combat was not of more than a few minutes’ duration; the corps,
+charged at once by foot and horse with the utmost vigour, broke and
+fled in the wildest disorder back into Eylau, closely pursued by the
+Russian cavalry and Cossacks, who made such havoc, that the whole,
+above 15,000 strong, were, with the exception of 1,500 men, taken or
+destroyed; and Augereau himself, with his two generals of divisions,
+Desjardins and Heudelet, was desperately wounded.”
+
+Cut off in one part of the field and hemmed in, the 24th of the Line,
+“one of the finest regiments in the Grand Army, and itself almost equal
+to a brigade,” as a French officer speaks of it, was destroyed to a
+man. It refused to turn its back to the enemy, and stood its ground to
+face its fate. The 24th were slaughtered as they stood in their ranks.
+Colonel Sémelé and a devoted band of soldiers fought round the Eagle to
+the last, and fell dead beside it. A Cossack picked the Eagle up and
+rode off with it.
+
+The 14th had led the attack. It had lost heavily from the Russian
+cannonade, but was still pressing on when the cavalry came charging
+down. The regiments next following it, however, had suffered still more
+heavily from the artillery fire. They were swept away _en masse_ by the
+Cossack rush. Thus the 14th were cut off and left by themselves, barely
+half a battalion of men in numbers, in the midst of the raging torrent
+of Cossacks and dragoons. The survivors hastily threw themselves into
+a square on and round a low elevation or hillock of snow. There, with
+their Eagle in their midst, they stood at bay, refusing to retire
+without direct orders from their marshal.
+
+[Sidenote: ISOLATED AND SURROUNDED]
+
+Marbot, in his memoirs, describes the fate of the 14th, to which he
+was sent with a message from Napoleon. He was one of Augereau’s aides
+de camp. It was just after the wounded marshal had been carried back
+to the churchyard of the village of Eylau, the centre of the French
+position, whence Napoleon, on horseback, among his personal suite,
+had witnessed the disaster. All could see the 14th standing there,
+isolated and surrounded; “we could see that the intrepid regiment,
+surrounded by the enemy, was brandishing the Eagle in the air, to show
+that it still held its ground and wanted help.” Napoleon, “touched by
+the grand devotion of these brave men, resolved to try to save them.
+He gave orders that an officer should be sent to tell them to try to
+make their way back towards the army. Cavalry would charge out to help
+them. It looked,” says Marbot, “almost impossible to get through the
+thronging Cossacks; but Napoleon’s command had to be obeyed.”
+
+“A brave captain of engineers named Froissart, who, though not an
+aide de camp, was on Augereau’s staff, happened to be nearest him,
+and was told to carry the order to the 14th. Froissart galloped off:
+we lost sight of him in the midst of the Cossacks, and never saw him
+again or heard what became of him. The marshal, seeing that the 14th
+did not move, then sent an officer named David. He had the same fate
+as Froissart; we never heard of him again. Probably both were killed
+and stripped, and could not be recognised among the many corpses which
+covered the ground. For the third time the marshal called, ‘The officer
+for duty!’ It was my turn.”
+
+Marbot had seen his two predecessors go off with their swords drawn, as
+though they intended to defend themselves against attacks on the way.
+He had remarked that, and now proposed another method for himself.
+
+“To attempt defence was madness; it meant stopping to fight amidst a
+multitude of enemies. I went otherwise to work. Leaving my sword in its
+scabbard, I considered myself rather as a rider who is trying to win
+a steeple-chase and goes as quickly as possible by the shortest line
+towards the appointed goal without troubling about what is to right or
+left of his path. My goal was the hillock on which stood the 14th, and
+I resolved to get there without taking heed of the Cossacks. I tried to
+put them out of my mind entirely. The plan answered to perfection.”
+
+“Lisette [Marbot’s charger], flying rather than galloping, moving more
+lightly than a swallow, darted over the intervening space, leaping the
+heaps of dead men and horses, the ditches, the broken gun-carriages,
+the half-extinguished bivouac fires. Thousands of Cossacks swarmed over
+the plain. The first who caught sight of me behaved like sportsmen
+who, while beating, start a hare and tell of its whereabouts to
+each other with shouts of ‘Your side!’ None of the Cossacks tried
+to stop me. Perhaps it was because of the amazing speed of my mare;
+perhaps--probably--because there were so many of them swarming round
+that each thought I could not escape from his comrades farther on. At
+any rate I got through them all, and without scratch either to myself
+or to my mare, and managed to reach where the 14th stood.
+
+[Sidenote: “AT LAST I WAS IN THE SQUARE!”]
+
+“I found them in square on top of their hillock, but the slope all
+round was very slight, and the Russian cavalry had been able to attack
+them with several charges. All, though, had been beaten off, and the
+regiment stood surrounded by a circle of dead horses and dragoons. The
+corpses indeed formed a kind of rampart round our men, and made by now
+their position almost inaccessible to mounted men. So I found, for in
+spite of the help of our men, I had much difficulty in getting across
+this horrible entrenchment. At last, however, I was in the square.”
+
+The major of the 14th was the senior officer left alive, and to him
+Marbot gave Napoleon’s order. But it was absolutely impossible to carry
+it out; there were too few men left to make the attempt possible. They
+would be overpowered, said the major to Marbot, before they had gone
+half a dozen steps. They were past hope now, unless the cavalry could
+cut their way to them at once. Marbot must save himself and get back
+at once. He must take their Eagle back with him and deliver it into
+Napoleon’s own hands. “I see no means left of saving the regiment,”
+were the major’s words. “Return to the Emperor, and bid him farewell
+from the 14th of the Line. We have faithfully obeyed his orders in
+defence of the Eagle. Bear him back his Eagle which he entrusted to us,
+which now we have no hope of defending longer. It would add too much
+to the bitterness of death for us to see it fall into the hands of the
+enemy.” The major handed the Eagle to Marbot and then saluted it, amid
+shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the men round.
+
+Marbot took the Eagle, and, as the only means of preserving it during
+his ride back, tried to break it off from its stout pole so as to
+conceal it under his cloak. He was in the act of leaning forward to
+get a purchase in order to break the oaken staff, when he was suddenly
+rendered powerless by the wind of a grape-shot. It was a marvellous
+escape from death. The shot actually went through his hat, within a
+quarter of an inch of his head. It deprived him, as he describes,
+of all power and sensation, although he still remained fixed in his
+saddle, his eyes witnessing the last scene, the fate of the 14th. The
+square was finally rushed by a swarm of Russian grenadiers, as Marbot
+says, who came charging up to the spot--“big men with mitre-shaped caps
+bound in brass.
+
+[Sidenote: FIGHTING TO THE LAST MAN]
+
+“These men hurled themselves furiously on the feeble remains of the
+14th. Our poor fellows had little strength left for resistance,
+weakened as they were by hardships and privations. They had for days
+been only existing on potatoes and melted snow, and on that morning
+had not had time to prepare even that wretched meal. Yet they made
+bravely what fight they could with their bayonets, and when, as too
+soon happened, the square was broken, they tried to hold together in
+groups, fighting back to back and keeping up the unequal fight to the
+last man.”
+
+Those nearest Marbot, so as not to be bayoneted from behind, stood
+all round him with their backs to the mare, hemmed in by a ring of
+Russians, some shooting down the hapless Frenchmen, others killing them
+with the bayonet.
+
+Marbot, recovering his senses, got at the last moment an unexpected
+chance of escape. His mare, Lisette, he says, “of a notoriously savage
+temper,” was pricked by a bayonet apparently, for she suddenly sprang
+forward, lashing out and kicking and biting. She crashed through the
+nearest Russians and galloped off with Marbot on her back towards
+Eylau. He was mistaken by the Cossacks, he thought, for a Russian
+officer, and rode on until suddenly Lisette collapsed beneath him,
+and Marbot rolled off into the snow, where he lay insensible for some
+hours. He lay there until a marauder on the field after the battle
+tried to strip him of his gold-laced uniform. That roused him, and he
+cried for help, which came; but the Eagle of the 14th had disappeared.
+
+Two Eagles of St. Hilaire’s division of Soult’s corps were taken at
+about the same time that the 14th met its fate. One was that of the
+10th Light Infantry, ridden down while hastening forward to support
+Augereau. The 10th missed its way in the snow-storm and, blundering
+close under the Russian guns, was “decimated by grape.” Immediately
+after that, while reeling under the shock, and trying to re-form its
+ranks, the Russian dragoons dashed into it. They burst into its midst
+at full gallop, “unseen until they were actually among us.” No help
+was near, and in less than three minutes the luckless 10th Light
+Infantry had ceased to exist. The second of Soult’s Eagles that was
+lost at Eylau was that of a battalion of the 28th of the Line, which
+also perished, victims to the sabres of the Russian horsemen. It was
+a little later in the day, just after the 28th had made a successful
+bayonet charge on the Russian infantry. They were in the midst of their
+combat when the dragoons dashed into them, rode through them, and
+scattered them, bearing off the Eagle, snatched from the hands of the
+Eagle-bearer, who was cut down in the _mêlée_.
+
+[Sidenote: “THE FIRST GRENADIER OF FRANCE”]
+
+The Heart of the “First Grenadier of France” nearly went to St.
+Petersburg at the same time, The 46th and 28th together formed General
+Levasseur’s division in Soult’s corps, and both were overwhelmed at
+the same time by the Russian dragoons. The more fortunate 46th saved
+both their Eagle and the silver casket in which the heart of La
+Tour d’Auvergne was kept enshrined. The casket was worn, strapped on
+a velvet shield, on the chest of the senior grenadier sergeant of
+the First Battalion, whose station was next the Eagle-bearer. It was
+with the 46th, then known as the 46th Demi-Brigade, that the heroic
+“Premier Grenadier de France” was serving as a captain when he met
+his death in the year of Hohenlinden, while in the act of capturing
+an Austrian standard. The 46th of the Line of the modern French Army
+keeps up to-day the traditional practice, first ordered by Moreau, the
+victor of Hohenlinden, of calling his name first of all at regimental
+parades. It was revived some thirty years ago, after being in desuetude
+since 1809. “Immediately the Colonel has saluted the flag,” describes
+one of the officers of the regiment, “the Captain commanding the
+colour-company steps forward and, facing the men, calls in a loud voice
+‘La Tour d’Auvergne,’ on which the senior sergeant of the company
+steps out two paces and replies, in a loud voice also, ‘Mort au Champ
+d’Honneur!’--‘Dead on the Field of Honour!’”
+
+The heart of La Tour d’Auvergne in its silver casket was ceremoniously
+deposited by the regiment at the Invalides in 1904, eight years ago.
+
+The 25th of the Line saved its Eagle, but lost on the field every
+single one of its officers. A plainly built obelisk with the brief
+inscription, “To the Memory of the Officers of the 25th,” was erected
+by Napoleon to commemorate their fate at Eylau.
+
+Two Eagles of Davout’s corps were lost at Eylau. One was that of the
+18th--the sole loss of an Eagle in the battle, as it so happens, that
+it suited Napoleon’s purpose to admit publicly. This is what he said of
+it in his Eylau Bulletin--the 58th Bulletin of the Grand Army:
+
+“The Eagle of one of the battalions of the 18th Regiment is missing. It
+has probably fallen into the hands of the enemy, but no reproach can
+attach to this regiment in the predicament in which it was placed. It
+is a mere accident of war. The Emperor will give the 18th another Eagle
+when it has taken a standard from the enemy.”
+
+Comments on this, by the way, a British officer, Colonel Sir Robert
+Wilson, who was attached to the Russian army as British military
+commissioner:
+
+“Admirable! the accidental loss of _one_ Eagle and only one! Colonel
+Beckendorff, then, did not carry _twelve_ Eagles (and, moreover,
+several colours from which the Eagles had been unscrewed) to
+Petersburg, where they now are for the inspection of the world!”
+
+Napoleon made no other open reference to the loss of Eagles at Eylau;
+but, as he showed a little later, he felt what had happened. On the
+other hand, outside France, many people disbelieved the Russian
+official despatches. “The number of Eagles said to be taken,” wrote the
+editor of a London newspaper, “is astounding, indeed incredible.”
+
+[Sidenote: TWO MORE EAGLES LOST]
+
+The 18th lost their Eagle in the fierce fighting on the extreme right
+of the battlefield, where, after storming the village of Serpallen,
+Morand’s division captured a Russian battery, bayoneting the gunners.
+As they took the guns a Russian cavalry brigade came hastening to
+the spot to the rescue. Taking the 18th on the flank, the Russians
+rode them down, breaking the regiment up and scattering it. The Eagle
+disappeared in the midst of the fight. The Eagle of the 51st of the
+Line was the other that was lost in Davout’s corps. That was taken by
+the Prussian division which fought at Eylau; the last remnant of the
+Jena army still combating in the field. The Prussians, some 12,000 in
+number, had made good their escape to the Polish frontier and reached
+the battlefield of Eylau at the close of the fight, in time to strike
+in and take vengeance for their countrymen. They were, however,
+deprived in the end of their trophy. The captured Eagle of the 51st was
+claimed from them by the Russian general after the battle, and sent
+with the eleven others to St. Petersburg, where it now is.
+
+Two others of Davout’s Eagles which came through at Eylau had narrow
+escapes. They were those of the 17th and 30th of the Line. The 17th
+was one of the regiments ridden down by Towazysky’s dragoons, the
+troopers who carried off the Eagle of the 18th. In their charge the
+dragoons broke up the 17th as well, and the Eagle was left with only a
+few men near by to defend it. They were in the midst of the dragoons as
+the Russians galloped through, slashing with their sabres at all within
+reach. As the only means of saving the Eagle, Locqueneux, a _fourrier_,
+or quartermaster-sergeant, “thrust the Eagle under the snow and stood
+on it shouting for help. Colonel Mallet heard the cry and ran to the
+rescue. With a few men who rallied to the spot he succeeded in getting
+the Eagle away from among the _débris_ of the 17th.” At roll-call next
+morning only one man in five answered to his name. Napoleon, on his
+ride over the field, happening to pass by while the muster was being
+held, the gallant _fourrier_ was brought before him and presented with
+a lieutenant’s commission and an annuity of 2,000 francs. The Eagle of
+the 30th of the Line, another of Morand’s regiments, was saved from
+capture in like manner by the personal devotion of another _fourrier_,
+Morin by name. All round him men were falling, and he himself had been
+severely wounded, but the brave fellow had just strength enough to bury
+the Eagle under the snow. He fainted from loss of blood as he did it.
+Morin was found next morning just alive, outstretched over where the
+precious Eagle lay concealed. He was able to make signs and indicate
+that it was lying underneath the snow, and then he died.
+
+[Sidenote: FOUR CUIRASSIER EAGLES TAKEN]
+
+Four cavalry Eagles, those of cuirassier regiments, made up the tale of
+twelve lost by Napoleon in the two days at Eylau. Platoff’s Cossacks
+of the Don captured the four. They swooped down on Murat’s cavalry,
+while out of hand and partially dispersed after breaking through the
+Russian centre, at the close of Murat’s desperate charge at the head of
+seventy squadrons to save the survivors of the massacre of Augereau’s
+ill-fated battalions. Of one cuirassier regiment only 18 men managed to
+regain their own lines, leaving 530 of their comrades on the field to
+be stripped of their shining armour by the Cossacks.
+
+The Eagle of the Old Guard led a charge at Eylau at the head of the
+Grenadiers. The Guard came into action to beat back a daring Russian
+counter-attack on the centre of Napoleon’s position, which immediately
+followed the annihilation of Augereau’s corps. Napoleon himself gave
+the order for the Guard to go forward. “The Emperor,” describes
+Caulaincourt, who was on Napoleon’s staff, and near him throughout,
+“standing erect in the stirrups, his glass at his eye, was the first to
+realise that the black shadow steadily drawing near through the veil
+of the snow-storm must be the columns of the Russian reserve.[16] He
+immediately sent against them two battalions of the Grenadiers of the
+Guard commanded by General Dorsenne.” It was just after Murat had been
+ordered to make his charge.
+
+Dorsenne--“Le Beau Dorsenne,” he was universally called; he had the
+reputation of being the handsomest man in the whole of the Grand
+Army--started off on the instant, rapidly deploying his men into lines
+as he moved forward, and with the Eagle of the Grenadiers of the Guard
+in advance of the centre of the front line. The Old Guard moved out
+in stately order, marching with clockwork precision, muskets at the
+support--held erect at the side and steadied and supported with one
+arm held stiffly across. One of the officers who rode beside Dorsenne
+suggested to the general as they were nearing the Russians to open
+fire. “Non!” was the haughty answer. “Grenadiers l’arme à bras! La
+Vieille Garde ne se bât qu’à la baïonette!” (“No! Arms at the support!
+The Old Guard only fights at the point of the bayonet!”)
+
+They reached the Russians, who, on their side, seemed for the moment
+as if spellbound at the sight of them. The nearest Russians stopped
+short. They stood stock-still, rooted in the ground as it were, gazing
+at the sudden apparition of the solid wall of 2,000 veteran giants in
+their huge towering bear-skins. The next instant the battalion guns
+of the Guard, which accompanied the advance on either flank, opened
+with a burst of fire at short range into the thick of the Russians. At
+once, down came the gleaming rows of bayonets, and, like one man, the
+Old Guard sprang forward and charged into the enemy. A moment before
+the bayonets crossed a squadron of the Chasseurs of the Guard, the men
+on duty as Napoleon’s own personal escort, sent forward by the Emperor
+himself to assist the Grenadiers, dashed into the rear of the Russian
+column, and “drove it forward on our Grenadiers, who received it with
+fixed bayonets.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLE OF THE OLD GUARD]
+
+Just before that it was that the Eagle of the Old Guard had its
+adventure. A shell dropped right in front of it and burst. The
+fragments smashed the Eagle pole in two places, just above and below
+the hands of the Eagle-bearer. The Eagle fell to the ground at the feet
+of the Russians. But they had not time to get hold of it. Instantly
+Lieutenant Morlay, the Eagle-bearer, sprang forward and recovered it.
+Picking the Eagle up, with the flag and fragment of pole that was left,
+Morlay snatched hold of a grenadier’s musket and jammed the piece of
+the staff into the muzzle beside the bayonet. He carried the Eagle in
+that manner throughout the rest of the battle.[17]
+
+[Sidenote: AT MIDNIGHT AFTER THE BATTLE]
+
+A hundred and fifty thousand combatants had faced one another at
+daybreak. An hour before midnight, when the last shots were fired,
+50,000 men lay dead or wounded on the field. “Never,” if we may recall
+the grim picture of the scene next day that Alison has drawn, “was
+spectacle so dreadful as that field presented on the following morning.
+Above 50,000 men lay in the space of two leagues, weltering in blood.
+The wounds were, for the most part, of the severest kind, from the
+extraordinary quantity of cannon-balls which had been discharged
+during the action and the close proximity of the contending masses to
+the deadly batteries, which spread grape at half-musket shot through
+their ranks. Though stretched on the cold snow and exposed to the
+severity of an Arctic winter, the sufferers were burning with thirst,
+and piteous cries were heard on all sides for water, or assistance
+to extricate the wounded men from beneath the heaps of slain or load
+of horses by which they were crushed. Six thousand of these noble
+animals encumbered the field, or, maddened with pain, were shrieking
+aloud amidst the stifled groans of the wounded. Broken gun-carriages,
+dismounted cannon, fragments of blown-up caissons, scattered balls, lay
+in wild confusion amidst casques, cuirassiers, and burning hamlets,
+casting a livid light over a field of snow. Subdued by loss of blood,
+tamed by cold, exhausted by hunger, the foemen lay side by side, amidst
+the general wreck. The Cossack was to be seen beside the Italian; the
+gay vine-dresser from the banks of the Garonne lay athwart the stern
+peasant from the plains of the Ukraine.”
+
+When Napoleon took his ride over the field, “the men exhibited none of
+their wonted enthusiasm; no cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ were heard; the
+bloody surface echoed only with the cries of suffering or the groans of
+woe.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE “TEMPLE OF VICTORY”]
+
+Sixteen Russian standards were sent to Paris after Eylau; Napoleon’s
+set-off to the twelve Eagles taken to St. Petersburg. They were to be
+hung, he directed, temporarily at the Invalides, until such time as
+the conversion of the former Church of the Madeleine into Napoleon’s
+grandiose “Temple of Victory” should be effected--a project that was
+fated never to be accomplished. There, designed Napoleon, all the
+trophies of the Grand Army would find their final resting-place,
+in a splendid edifice, designed externally after the Parthenon at
+Athens. Within, the trophies would be displayed, amidst colonnades
+of Corinthian pillars of marble and granite and a mass of decorative
+sculptures, statues of marshals and generals who had met their death
+in battle, and bas-reliefs of famous colonels, before a lofty marble
+curule chair, which Napoleon would occupy as a throne on great
+occasions. “It is a Temple I desire,” he laid down, writing from his
+camp in Poland, “not a church; and everything must be made in a chaste,
+severe, and durable style, and be suitable for solemnities at all times
+and all hours.”
+
+Two more Eagles had yet to go to St. Petersburg before the war was
+over--the Eagle of the 15th of the Line and another. They were the
+spoils that the beaten Russian army carried off from the battle of
+Friedland, fought some six months after Eylau, on July 14. Napoleon
+won one of his most famous victories at Friedland, and one that he
+afterwards recorded on the colours of all the regiments that fought in
+the battle; but the defeated army carried back with them two more of
+his Eagles.
+
+The Eagle of the 15th of the Line, a regiment of Marshal Ney’s corps,
+was lost in a bayonet charge while fighting the Russian Imperial Guard.
+The second Eagle was left among the dead in the repulse of a column of
+Marshal Lannes’ corps in the earlier part of the battle. “A column of
+3,000 men advanced straight against Friedland. They were permitted to
+approach close to the Russian cannon without a single shot being fired,
+when suddenly the whole opened with grape, and with such effect that in
+a few minutes a thousand men were struck down, the column routed, and
+the Eagle taken.”
+
+One of the regiments of the column saved itself as it fell back by
+rallying round its Eagle. As at Eylau, so at Friedland the Russian
+dragoons dashed down among the broken battalions while trying to
+re-form under the murderous cannonade. The 50th of the Line had been
+near the head of the column, and more than half of its men had been
+shot down. The dragoons were cutting their way through to the Eagle,
+when Adjutant Labourie snatched it from its wounded bearer, and,
+holding it up, shouted to the men: “Rally round the Eagle. We must
+defend it to the death!” A small square hastily formed round him, and,
+stubbornly resisting, they kept the Russian dragoons off and fought
+their way back to safety with the Eagle.
+
+[Sidenote: GOLDEN WREATHS FOR THE EAGLES]
+
+The Peace of Tilsit closed the war within a month of Friedland.
+
+The welcome-home of Paris to the Old Guard, and public decoration
+of the Eagles with crowns of gold, was the curtain-scene and grand
+_finale_ of the Jena-Friedland drama. To all the regiments of the Grand
+Army under fire at Jena, Friedland, and Eylau, wreaths of gold, to be
+affixed round the necks of their Eagles, were voted by the Municipality
+of Paris. The wreaths were to be publicly presented to each regiment on
+its return to France.
+
+The Guard were the first to receive theirs, and their arrival in the
+capital was made the occasion of a series of civic fêtes; announced
+officially as being “offered in tribute to the Glory of the Grand
+Army.” Wednesday, November 25, 1807, was the day on which the Guard
+were due to reach Paris. All had been made ready to accord them a
+magnificent reception.
+
+The Prefect of the Seine, at the head of the City magistrates and
+the Municipal Councillors of Paris, all in their robes and chains
+and glittering insignia of office, escorted by a mounted cohort of
+National Guards, met the returning veterans at the Barrier on the
+Strasburg road. Marshal Bessières led the Guard, who marched up with
+bands playing and resplendent in their full-dress uniforms, horse
+and foot and artillery--12,000 men in all. A gigantic triumphal arch
+was set up beyond the Barrier, wide enough for twenty men to march
+through abreast. It was the approach to a wide arena on which the
+troops drew up, massed in front of a lofty platform, decked out with
+flags and wreaths of evergreens and bright-coloured hangings. There the
+Prefect took his place with his _entourage_ as the soldiers drew near.
+Grand-stands to accommodate a crowd of sightseers surrounded the arena.
+
+The Old Guard marched in and drew up in close order, on which the
+proceedings opened with the civic address. “Heroes of Jena, of Eylau,
+of Friedland,” began the Prefect, “conquerors of a splendid peace,
+immortal thanks are your due from France! We salute you, Eagles of
+war, the symbols of the might of our noble-hearted Emperor! You have
+made known throughout the world, with his great name, the glory of
+victorious France!” So, in grandiloquent style, the address commenced.
+At its close the regiments of the Guards defiled past the platform in
+turn--Carabineers and Cuirassiers, Chasseurs, Dragoons, and Hussars,
+and the battalions of veteran Grenadiers. Round the neck of each Eagle,
+as its corps came up, the Prefect hung a wreath of laurel-leaves in
+gold.
+
+Then came the triumphal march through the streets of Paris to the
+Tuileries, amid cheering crowds, nearly beside themselves with
+excitement and enthusiasm, and with difficulty kept back from breaking
+through the rows of National Guards who lined the pavement, to hug the
+grim bearskin-hatted warriors. The Eagles deposited with ceremony in
+the Imperial Guardroom of the Palace of the Tuileries, the horsemen
+dismounted in the Square of the Carrousel, muskets were piled, and all
+marched off to the Champs Elysées. An immense banquet awaited them
+there, under vast marquees--shelter that the men appreciated, for it
+turned out a miserably wet afternoon.
+
+[Sidenote: BANQUETED BY THE CITY OF PARIS]
+
+The banquet in the Champs Elysées was the first in the round of
+festivities with which Paris welcomed home the “Victors over Europe.”
+The fêtes lasted over three days, and terminated in a grand reception
+given by the Senate to all ranks of “Our Invincible Guard” in the
+Gardens of the Luxembourg.[18]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE
+
+THE “EAGLE-GUARD”
+
+
+The loss of twelve Eagles in one battle made a deep and lasting
+impression upon Napoleon. That twelve of his cherished emblems, those
+mementoes of victorious Caesar, for whose prestige he had advanced
+such exacting claims, should have fallen _en bloc_ into the hands
+of the enemy came as a galling blow to Napoleon’s military pride.
+Twelve Eagles reft from amid the bayonets of the Grand Army on one
+battlefield: twelve Eagles paraded together as trophies through the
+capital of an exulting foe! It was a poignantly felt humiliation for
+the mighty Imperator of the Field of Mars. And yet no default could be
+charged against the soldiers to whom these Eagles had been entrusted.
+All that men might do for their defence they had done. Most of the
+luckless battalions, indeed, had fought and fallen directly under the
+eyes of the Emperor himself, looking on from his post of vantage by the
+wall of Eylau churchyard.
+
+Napoleon, however, had already realised that his distribution of an
+emblem to whose preservation he attached such extreme importance had
+been made on too lavish a scale. He had been imprudent in distributing
+such hostages to fortune broadcast; there were too many Eagles on
+offer to the enemy. Napoleon, indeed, had already tacitly admitted
+that. Within two months of the opening of the first campaign of the
+Grand Army--during the Austerlitz campaign--immediately after Murat’s
+daring gallop on Vienna, Napoleon had summarily directed all the
+light cavalry Eagles to be sent back from the front. Every Hussar and
+Chasseur regiment was ordered to return its three squadron Eagles to
+head-quarters forthwith, for sending back to France. In future, a new
+Army regulation laid down, those corps would not take their Eagles into
+the field at all. The regulation after that was extended to Dragoons;
+and later to all Light Infantry battalions. No doubt it was a step
+dictated by prudence. In these corps particularly, from the nature of
+the duties they had normally to perform, the Eagles were peculiarly
+exposed to risk of isolation and capture.
+
+What had happened at Eylau, and several narrow escapes in hand-to-hand
+combats at Friedland, together with certain other incidents in that
+battle which had come under Napoleon’s personal notice, where, through
+a nervous anxiety for the safety of their Eagles, some battalion
+commanders had kept back round them men whose bayonets were badly
+wanted elsewhere, led to a further step. Napoleon took advantage of
+the general scheme for the reorganisation of the Grand Army, which he
+carried out in 1808, to recast entirely his original arrangement as to
+the Eagles. He reduced the numbers by two-thirds.
+
+[Sidenote: NO MORE BATTALION EAGLES]
+
+Battalion Eagles were to be withdrawn in favour of Regimental Eagles.
+In the infantry, under the reorganisation scheme, there were to be five
+battalions to each regiment instead of three as heretofore; but there
+would be only one Eagle in future for the entire regiment. The existing
+Second and Third battalions were ordered to give up the Eagles they had
+hitherto carried, which would find a resting-place at the Invalides.
+The Regimental Eagle would be borne by the First Battalion. The other
+battalions would carry only “fanions,” small pennon-shaped flags. Each
+would have one “fanion,” a plain serge flag, of a distinctive colour
+for each battalion, without any mark or device on it, beyond the number
+of the battalion.
+
+The Imperial edict, issued early in 1808, laid down that for the
+special protection of the Regimental Eagle in battle a commissioned
+officer and two picked veterans were to be appointed as the
+“Eagle-Guard,” replacing the sergeant-major and escort of the
+Battalion Eagles. The three were to be known as the First, Second,
+and Third Eagle-Bearers or “Porte-Aigles.” The officer to whose
+special charge the Regimental Eagle itself was committed was to be a
+senior lieutenant, “a man of proved valour, with not less than ten
+years’ Army service, including service on the battlefield in four
+campaigns,” specified as those of Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland.
+He would receive captain’s pay, and wear a gold-laced cocked hat and
+gold epaulettes. The two other Porte-Aigles were to be, in Napoleon’s
+own words, “deux braves,” of ten years’ service in the ranks, and
+“non-lettrés.” On the last qualification, indeed, Napoleon laid
+peculiar stress. The two were to be, as the Emperor himself put it,
+“men who could neither read nor write, so that their only hope of
+promotion should be through acts of special courage and devotion.” They
+would receive lieutenants’ pay, have special privileges, and wear four
+gold lace chevrons on their arms. Only the Emperor could nominate or
+degrade Porte-Aigles.
+
+[Sidenote: PENNONS TO FRIGHTEN HORSES]
+
+The Second and Third Porte-Aigles were to carry no weapons except heavy
+pistols, “to blow out the brains of an enemy attempting to lay hands
+on an Eagle.” These were Napoleon’s own words as to that, in his order
+of February 18, 1808: “Pour éviter que l’ardeur dans la mêlée ne les
+détourne de leur unique objet, de la garde de l’Aigle, le sabre et
+l’épée leurs sont interdits. Ils n’auront d’autres armes que plusieurs
+paires de pistolets, d’emploi que de veiller froidement a brûler la
+cervelle de celui qui avancerait la main pour saisir l’Aigle.” After
+the Wagram campaign of 1809 Napoleon substituted a helmet and defensive
+brass scale-epaulettes as the First Porte-Aigle’s equipment. He gave
+the two soldiers of the Eagle-Guard a halberd each, with a pennon
+or banderol attached--Red for the Second Porte-Aigle, White for the
+Third--as well as a sword and a pair of large-bore pistols. The pennons
+were for use should mounted men attack the Eagle; “for fluttering in
+front of the horses in order to make them rear and plunge and upset
+their riders.”[19]
+
+Two more soldiers were added to the Eagle-Guard in 1813, as the Fourth
+and Fifth Porte-Aigles. They were armed with the same weapons as
+the others, and had respectively Yellow and Green pennons on their
+halberds.
+
+Yet further to add to the prestige of the Eagles, Napoleon, after
+Wagram, decreed the institution of a Special Order of Military Merit,
+which he called the “Order of the Trois Toisons d’Or”--something on the
+lines of our own Victoria Cross--certain of the provisions of which
+had direct reference to the Eagles. The decoration was to be conferred
+on men, whatever their rank, “distinguished in the defence of the
+Eagle of their regiment.” Also, according to the 6th Article of the
+Constitution of the Order, “Les Aigles des régiments qui ont assisté
+avec distinction aux grandes batailles seront décorés de l’Ordre des
+Trois Toisons d’Or.”[20]
+
+The special distinction of having the badge of the Legion of Honour
+affixed to its Eagle as a decoration to the regimental standard was in
+1812 granted to one corps, the celebrated 57th. It was as a reward
+for magnificent intrepidity displayed under the eyes of Napoleon
+at the battle of Borodino. The 57th had at the same time a further
+and unique mark of Imperial regard awarded to it. Napoleon ordered
+that a representation of the badge of the Legion of Honour should be
+stamped on the uniform buttons of the regiment. No corps of the Grand
+Army, perhaps, had a finer fighting tradition than this splendid
+regiment--the same “_Terrible 57me qui rien n’arrête_,” of the Army of
+Italy; which, too, as has been said, Napoleon singled out for a special
+word of encouragement on the morning of Austerlitz; calling to them
+as he rode past, “You will remember to-day, Fifty-seventh, how I once
+named you ‘Le Terrible’!”
+
+But, with regard to the Regimental Eagles of 1808, even for Napoleon it
+was one thing to decree the abolition of Battalion Eagles, and another
+to obtain compliance with the order that the surplus Eagles should be
+returned to the War Minister for laying up at the Invalides.
+
+[Sidenote: SOME CORPS DID NOT OBEY]
+
+A number of second and third battalions of regiments stationed at
+places out of the way of direct Imperial inspection--in garrisons
+beyond the frontiers, in subjugated countries, or in the remaining
+overseas possessions of France--continued for some time to evade the
+order recalling their Eagles. No doubt, too, they were unwilling to
+part with standards some of which had led the corps under fire at
+Austerlitz and Jena.
+
+Napoleon had to repeat his order of recall twice: once during 1809; the
+second time in 1811. That second order was the outcome of a discovery
+made by the Emperor himself. At an Imperial review of the troops of the
+Amsterdam and North Holland garrisons on October 12, 1810, three of the
+regiments had the temerity to parade before the Emperor’s eyes with
+four Eagles apiece--one to each battalion. Such flagrant disobedience
+could not be overlooked; and then subsequent inquiries brought out
+the fact that elsewhere there were many Battalion Eagles which had
+similarly been retained against orders. An additional discovery was
+made at the same time, that the Fourth-Battalion Eagles had been
+supplied surreptitiously, through some official at the Ministry of War,
+entirely without Napoleon’s knowledge.
+
+It made Napoleon excessively angry. He complained bitterly to Marshal
+Berthier at the way in which the department which had to do with the
+standards of the Army had been mismanaged. “La partie des drapeaux des
+régiments,” he declared, “est aujourd’hui dans un grand chaos.” To
+the Minister of War, General Clarke, Duc de Feltre, Napoleon sent a
+stinging letter of rebuke.
+
+With the letter went the draft of yet another decree, to be
+communicated to every corps in the service.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S FINAL ORDER]
+
+    “I only give,” wrote Napoleon now, “one Eagle per regiment
+    of infantry, one per regiment of cavalry, one per regiment of
+    artillery, one per regiment of special gendarmerie. None to the
+    departmental companies or guards of honour.
+
+    “No corps may possess an Eagle which has not been bestowed by my
+    own hand.
+
+    “All regiments, further, of whatever denomination, if they did not
+    receive the Eagle they are authorised to possess from the hand of
+    the Emperor in person, either directly on parade, or through a
+    regimental deputation, must return it to the Ministry of War for
+    the will of his Majesty to be declared as to that Eagle.
+
+    “All other corps are to carry ‘fanions,’ ordinary flags. Infantry
+    regiments reduced below 1,000 men in strength, and cavalry
+    regiments of less than 500 men, cannot retain their Eagle, and must
+    return it to the dépôt. They will be accorded a standard [drapeau]
+    without the Eagle.
+
+    “All the infantry regiments now in possession of an Eagle per
+    battalion, and cavalry with one per squadron, are to send the
+    extra-regulation Eagles at once to Paris, to be kept [_déposées_]
+    at the Invalides until they can be placed in the ‘Temple of Glory’
+    [the Church of the Madeleine, then being rebuilt].” “Jusqu’à ce
+    qu’elles puissent être misées dans le Temple de la Gloire,” was
+    what Napoleon wrote.
+
+Three of the British trophy-Eagles now at Chelsea, it may be remarked
+in passing, bear the number “82.” They came into our hands in February
+1809, at the surrender of Martinique to a conjoint British military
+and naval expedition. The 82nd was one of the regiments referred to as
+out of the way of direct inspection; in garrison across the Atlantic.
+It had not obeyed the order of 1808 to return its Second and Third
+Battalion Eagles to Paris--with the result that three Eagles at Chelsea
+represent the misfortune of this one regiment.
+
+“The First Battalion,” ordered Napoleon in his decree of 1811, “is to
+carry the Eagle: the other battalions will have each a fanion, quite
+plain, as follows: 2nd Battalion, White; 3rd, Red; 4th, Blue. Where
+certain regiments may possess additional battalions, these are to have,
+the 5th a Green fanion, the 6th a Yellow fanion.”[21]
+
+In 1813, in Napoleon’s conscript army levied to replace the
+host destroyed in Russia, the newly raised Line regiments, and
+“Provisional-Regiments,” made up of the amalgamated dépôt battalions of
+various corps, had to earn their Eagles on the battlefield. “No newly
+raised regiment,” ordered Napoleon, “is to receive an Eagle until after
+his Majesty has been satisfied with its service before the enemy.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE ONLY NAMES ALLOWED]
+
+The flags issued in 1808, and after that, to go with the Regimental
+Eagles, were much more elaborate than those of the Champ de Mars. They
+had white diamond-shaped centre panels, similar to those in the flags
+presented on the Field of Mars, but with Imperial crowns embroidered in
+gold on the red and blue upper corners of the flag, and golden Eagles
+on the lower corners. Gold embroidered wreaths of laurel, encircling
+the Imperial monogram “N.” divided off the crowns above from the Eagles
+below. A border of gold fringe round the entire flag, embroidered
+with bees, was another new enrichment. In these flags the regimental
+battle-honour inscriptions on the reverse side of the white centre
+space in the former flags appeared in a revised from. Only victories of
+importance since the institution of the Empire, and at which Napoleon
+had commanded in person, were admitted. Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau,
+Friedland, Eckmühl, Essling, Wagram, constituted the full list from
+which selection was made. One regiment alone was allowed to record an
+earlier victory:--the Imperial Guard. They preserved their “Marengo”
+honour. Inscriptions such as “Le 75e arrive et bât l’ennemi,” “J’étais
+tranquille, le 32e était là,” and the others which had been allowed on
+the flags of the Field of Mars, recalling deeds of the Army of Italy,
+disappeared from the revised pattern of 1808. A new inscription was
+specially authorised for the flag of one regiment, in honour of a feat
+of great distinction during the Wagram campaign. The 84th of the Line
+was permitted to inscribe “Un contre dix--Grätz, 1809”--but that only
+lasted for three years; the inscription was ordered to be taken off in
+1811.
+
+The design of the flag introduced in 1808 held until 1814. A less
+elaborate design was adopted for the Eagle-standards of the “Hundred
+Days,” two specimens of which are in this country--the Waterloo
+trophies at Chelsea.
+
+Attractive and handsome as the new flag was, the Army, as before,
+looked on it as but an appendage, as merely “l’ornement de l’Aigle.”
+The Eagle at the head of the staff, by itself, was all that nine
+soldiers out of ten troubled about. Not a few regiments, indeed, when
+on service, removed the flags altogether from their Eagle-poles and
+displayed as their standard the Eagle only. Particularly was this the
+case in Spain, where many regiments were in the field continuously,
+in some instances, for over six years--from 1808 to 1814. Asked one
+day after the Peninsular War about the inscription and battle-honours
+on the flag of his regiment, an infantry _chef de bataillon_ frankly
+confessed that he had “never set eyes on it!” The silken flag, he
+explained, “had been removed from the Eagle-pole before he first
+joined as a lieutenant, and had always, as he understood, been kept
+at the dépôt of the corps in France, rolled up and locked away in the
+regimental chest. The Eagle on its bare pole was all he had ever seen.”
+
+Said another officer: “We never spoke of the regiment’s ‘colours,’ and
+never saw them. We spoke only of ‘the Eagle.’”
+
+[Sidenote: WHEN NAPOLEON MET AN EAGLE]
+
+This may be added. Napoleon was scrupulously exact in showing respect
+to the Eagle of a regiment whenever he passed one; whether on the line
+of march, or in bivouac, under a sentry, with the Eagle-Guard near at
+hand, resting horizontally on a support of piled muskets with bayonets
+fixed. If on horseback, Napoleon always uncovered and bowed low; if on
+the line of march, he sometimes stopped his carriage in passing, and
+got out, saluted the Eagle, and said a few words about the regiment’s
+battle record to the Eagle-Guard.
+
+Between the review on the Field of Mars in 1804 and the overthrow on
+the plains of Leipsic in 1814 the number of regiments in the Grand Army
+increased continuously, requiring the presentation of many new Eagles.
+Forty-four were presented in the period to the infantry alone; to the
+regiments of the Line bearing numbers from the 113th to 156th; besides
+others to the regiments of the “Middle Guard” and “Young Guard,” and
+to two additional regiments of Cuirassiers. In every case Napoleon,
+in accordance with the stipulation that he so insisted on, made the
+presentation in person, with his own hand.
+
+In not a few instances, indeed, the ceremony took place on campaign;
+and for one of these exceptionally interesting occasions we have
+available the notes of an eye-witness. It was at the presentation of
+the Eagle of the 126th Regiment of the Line, in Germany, in 1813.
+
+Napoleon made his appearance in his campaigning uniform, the dark
+green undress of the Chasseurs of the Guard, and mounted as usual on
+a grey charger. His staff, all brilliant in full dress, attended him.
+Approaching the scene at a canter, they all slowed down to a walk as
+they neared where the regiment stood, with its battalions parading
+every available man, and drawn up to form three sides of a hollow
+square. The new Eagle, enveloped in the leather casing in which it had
+been brought from France, lay on a pile of drums on one flank of the
+First Battalion, and a little in advance. The fourth, or open, side of
+the square was for the Imperial staff, who drew up there, while the
+Emperor by himself rode into the middle of the square. As Napoleon
+reined up, the regimental drums beat the _Appel_, and the officers of
+the regiment stepped to the front, with swords at the carry, and formed
+in line before the Emperor.
+
+Marshal Berthier, Chief of the Head-quarter Staff, then rode across to
+where the Eagle lay. He dismounted to receive it at the hands of the
+First Porte-Aigle, the Eagle being uncased at the same time. Berthier
+saluted the Eagle; then, holding it erect with both hands, the
+marshal bore it ceremoniously along in front of the row of officers,
+who saluted with lowered swords as the Eagle passed, the drums of the
+regiment now beating a long roll. Halting close in front of Napoleon,
+Berthier inclined the Eagle forward in salute, and the Emperor, on his
+side, uncovered and bowed in return. Then, drawing his glove from his
+left hand, Napoleon raised his hand and extended it towards the Eagle.
+He held the reins, according to his custom, in his right hand. Napoleon
+began his address to the corps in a deep, impressive tone:
+
+[Sidenote: AT A PRESENTATION IN THE FIELD]
+
+“Soldiers of the 126th Regiment of the Line, I entrust to you the Eagle
+of France! It is to serve to you ever as your rallying-point. You swear
+to me never to abandon it, but with life! You swear never to suffer an
+affront to it for the honour of France! You swear ever to prefer death
+for it to dishonour! You swear!” The last words were pronounced with a
+peculiar stress, in a very solemn tone, with intense energy.
+
+Instantly the officers of the regiment replied. Holding their swords on
+high, with one voice they shouted: “We swear!”
+
+The next moment the words were taken up and repeated enthusiastically
+by the men: “We swear!”
+
+Berthier, on that, formally handed the Eagle over to the colonel of the
+regiment, and the Emperor, raising his hand to his hat in salute to
+the Eagle, turned to rejoin the Staff and ride off elsewhere.
+
+On the afternoon before the three days’ battle of Leipsic opened, on
+October 15, 1813, Napoleon, on the Marchfeldt, in the very presence of
+the enemy, presented with these formalities new Eagles to three newly
+raised regiments.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BEFORE THE ENEMY AT ASPERN AND WAGRAM
+
+
+Napoleon’s regimental Eagles made their début on the battlefield in the
+Wagram campaign of 1809, when Austria challenged Napoleon to a second
+trial of strength in her premature attempt to achieve the liberation
+of Germany. The gallant deeds of the regiments that fought round the
+Eagles in that war are commemorated on the standards of the French
+Army to-day by the legend “Wagram, 1809,” a name and date that stand
+as the comprehensive memento of a conflict that lasted four months,
+and included no fewer than ten fiercely fought battles. They are
+superabundant as a fact; it would almost need a book by itself to tell
+the full story. It must suffice therefore to take here only these,
+picked out at random, as typical of the rest.
+
+This is the achievement that “Wagram, 1809,” inscribed in golden
+letters on the silken tricolor standard of the present-day 65th of the
+Line, serves to recall.
+
+Napoleon’s 65th was one of the regiments of Marshal Davout’s corps
+at Ratisbon, where Davout had been stationed on the eve of the
+outbreak of the war. He was hastily recalled on the Austrians opening
+hostilities and advancing in greatly superior force. Davout fell back
+at once, leaving behind him the 65th to hold the very important bridge
+over the Danube at Ratisbon for forty-eight hours, until the bulk of
+his corps had gained a sufficient start on their way.
+
+The 65th had not long to wait for the enemy. Within twelve hours of
+the marshal’s retirement the Austrians swooped down on Ratisbon to
+seize the bridge. Two of their army corps led the advance. One took
+possession of the city, sending troops forward to secure the bridge.
+Part of the other crossed the Danube in the neighbourhood of the city
+in boats, in order to cut off and capture the French troops left
+behind. It was expected that in the presence of so overpowering an
+enemy the single French regiment holding the bridge would not venture
+to make a serious defence. The Austrians did not know the 65th.
+
+To oppose the first comers three battalions of the 65th barricaded and
+loopholed the houses nearest the bridge on that side. The remaining
+battalion held a fortified outwork, or bridge-head, across the river.
+
+For a whole day the battalions in the city held the Austrians at bay,
+resisting desperately in the streets and from house to house. Four
+hundred Austrian prisoners, together with an Austrian regimental
+standard and three other flags, testified to the way they did their
+duty. The battalion holding the bridge-head on the farther side of the
+river made meanwhile a no less stubborn resistance and kept the enemy
+off until nightfall. Then, however, it was found that their ammunition
+was exhausted. The three battalions fighting the city were by that
+time in a no less desperate plight. They on their side had been forced
+back to their last defences among the houses immediately surrounding
+the approach to the bridge. Still, though, they kept up a fierce
+resistance, at the last using cartridges taken from the cartouche-boxes
+of the Austrian prisoners and their own dead and wounded comrades. They
+held out until further defence of the bridge was impossible, until
+indeed further resistance at all was hopeless.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW WERE THEY TO SAVE THE EAGLE?]
+
+But the regimental Eagle? What was to become of that? The Eagle of the
+65th must at all cost be kept from being surrendered into an enemy’s
+hands. What was to be done? At first it was suggested that an officer,
+known to be a good swimmer, should try to swim down the river with
+it in the dark until he could land safely on the farther bank, after
+which he should do his best to make his way to wherever Napoleon might
+be, there to render personally into his hands the sacred Eagle. But
+the other surviving officers were loth to part with their treasured
+standard in that way. The risk of a man getting through the Austrians
+who were swarming on the other side of the Danube was considered too
+great. It was then suggested to sink it in the Danube, noting the
+spot, so as to be able to fish it up again on some future day. Colonel
+Coutard, in command of the 65th, however, was against that. They might
+never be able, or have time, to find it at the bottom of a deep and
+swiftly flowing river like the Danube. He proposed to conceal the Eagle
+in the ground, burying it in some secret place. There it might without
+difficulty be recovered later on and brought back to France. The
+colonel’s proposal was assented to, and then a further suggestion was
+made. Their Eagle should be given a fitting shroud by wrapping round
+it the captured Austrian flags they had taken that afternoon. That
+would preserve the trophies also for future days when the fortune of
+war again favoured the regiment. The idea was eagerly taken up, and the
+Eagle was buried in a cellar, wrapped up in the Austrian flags.
+
+[Sidenote: WRAPPED UP IN CAPTURED FLAGS]
+
+After that, at the very last, just as the Austrians were about to
+launch another attack it was impossible to withstand, Colonel Coutard
+had the _chamade_ beaten, and the 65th surrendered. They were granted,
+as they well deserved, the honours of war, and were for the time being
+confined under guard in the city. Their captivity, however, was not
+for long. Their release came about in a very few days on the Austrian
+troops hurriedly evacuating Ratisbon before Napoleon’s triumphant
+advance.[22] The Eagle was now dug up, and Colonel Coutard, with a
+deputation from the regiment, waited on Napoleon on his arrival, to
+present the Eagle before him, still wrapped up in the three captured
+Austrian flags.
+
+In recognition of the endurance that the 65th had shown, the colonel
+was created a Baron of the Empire; crosses of the Legion of Honour were
+distributed broadcast among all ranks; forty soldiers who had shown
+exceptional gallantry in the fighting were, as a reward, specially
+transferred to the Old Guard.
+
+Such is the fine story that the battle-honour “Wagram, 1809,” lettered
+in gold on the regimental tricolor of the present-day 65th of the Line
+in the French Army commemorates, and care is taken that every young
+soldier on joining is made acquainted with it.
+
+Equally fine as an exploit, and yet more renowned for the exceptional
+honour that Napoleon paid to the Eagle of the regiment, was the
+splendid heroism that the 84th of the Line displayed at Grätz in
+Styria. That episode of the campaign, indeed, is commemorated by a
+double battle-honour on the flag of the 84th of the modern French Army.
+Both “Wagram, 1809,” and “Un contre dix--Grätz, 1809” are inscribed in
+golden letters on its tricolor. Napoleon himself, as has been said,
+bestowed the honour of the unique inscription on the regimental flag.
+He had also the words “Un contre dix” incised on the square tablet
+supporting the Eagle itself. Here is the story of the exploit as
+related by one of Napoleon’s staff officers in the campaign, Colonel
+Lejeune:
+
+[Sidenote: KEPT OFF WITH THE BAYONET]
+
+“Amongst all these battles and victories there was one action so
+remarkable and so brilliant that I feel impelled to describe it here
+from the accounts of eye-witnesses. During the taking of Grätz by
+General Broussier, and when the struggle was at its fiercest, Colonel
+Gambin of the 84th Regiment was ordered, with two of his battalions,
+to attack the suburb of St. Leonard, where he made from four to five
+hundred prisoners. This vigorous assault led General Guilay on the
+enemy’s side to imagine he had to deal with a whole army, and he
+hurried to the aid of the suburb with considerable forces. Gambin did
+not hesitate to attack them, and he took from them the cemetery of the
+Graben suburb, but was in his turn invested by the Austrian battalions,
+and found it impossible to rejoin the main body of the French. He
+accepted the situation, spent the whole of the night in fortifying
+the cemetery and the adjoining houses, and, his ammunition being
+exhausted, he actually kept at bay some 10,000 assailants with the
+bayonet alone, even making several sorties to carry off the cartouches
+on the dead bodies with which his attacks had strewn the ground near
+the cemetery. General Guilay now directed the fire of all his guns and
+five fresh battalions on this handful of brave men, who had already
+for nineteen hours withstood a whole army. General Broussier was at
+last able to send Colonel Nagle of the 92nd, with two battalions, to
+the aid of the 84th. The enemy vainly endeavoured to prevent the two
+regiments from meeting. Colonel Nagle overthrew every obstacle, got
+into the cemetery, and after embracing each other the two officers,
+with their united forces, flung themselves upon the Austrians, took 500
+of them prisoners, with two flags, and carried the suburb of Graben by
+assault, finding no less than 1,200 Austrian corpses in the streets.
+When the Emperor heard of this feat of arms, he was anxious to confer
+the greatest distinction he could on the 84th Regiment, and ordered
+that its banner should henceforth bear in letters of gold the proud
+inscription, ‘One against ten.’”
+
+Seldom indeed did the soldiers of Napoleon encounter a more determined
+enemy than the Austrians proved themselves in the war of 1809.
+At Aspern, the battle on the Danube near Vienna, where Napoleon
+experienced his first defeat on the Continent, more than one Eagle
+came within an ace of being taken. The Eagle of the 9th of the Line,
+for instance, to save it from what appeared to be imminent capture,
+was actually buried on the battlefield in the middle of the fighting.
+“Our colonel,” wrote one of the men of the 9th, “took the Eagle of the
+regiment, pulled it from its staff, and, after digging a hole in the
+ground with a pioneer’s tool, buried and concealed there our rallying
+signal to prevent it from falling into the enemy’s hands.” It was,
+though, after all, an unnecessary precaution. The hard-pressed 9th were
+rescued at the last moment, whereupon the Eagle made its reappearance.
+
+[Sidenote: VICTIMS OF A PANIC IN THE DARK]
+
+Three other Eagles, less fortunate, are now in the Austrian Army Museum
+at Vienna; those of the 35th of the Line and of the 95th and 106th. The
+Eagle of the 35th was taken on the Italian frontier near Lake Garda,
+in a surprise attack at daybreak on the camp of the Viceroy, Eugène
+Beauharnais, by the troops of the Archduke John. The other two fell
+into Austrian hands on the night of the opening attack at Wagram,
+victims of a panic that suddenly seized one of the French columns.
+It had led the attack on the centre of the Austrian position with
+brilliant success.
+
+Two thousand prisoners and five standards had been taken, and the
+French were advancing exultantly, when the Austrians counter-attacked
+with fresh troops, headed by the Archduke Charles in person. The
+French resisted stubbornly, and at first successfully. They held their
+own until, in the midst of furious hand-to-hand fighting, they were
+suddenly charged by cavalry. It was late evening, and in the gathering
+dusk a sudden panic seized a regiment on the flank. The panic spread
+instantly to the whole of the attacking column. All order was lost
+forthwith. The soldiers gave way in confusion, broke up, and went
+racing back headlong, a mob of fugitives, down the steep ascent that a
+few minutes before they had so gallantly won. As they went back in a
+tumultuous rush, fresh French troops, coming up to their support, “in
+the darkness mistook the retreating host for enemies and fired upon it;
+they, in their turn, were overthrown by the torrent of fugitives.” The
+Austrian prisoners taken in the advance escaped, the captured Austrian
+standards were recaptured, and two Eagles disappeared in the dark amid
+the turmoil. Those are the two now at Vienna.
+
+Fortunately for Napoleon the Austrian leaders did not realise the
+smashing nature of the blow they had dealt. The fate of Napoleon’s
+Empire otherwise might have been decided on that night. Unaware that
+the panic had “spread an indescribable alarm through the French centre
+as far as the tent of the Emperor, they stopped the advance, sounded
+the recall, and fell back to their original positions.”
+
+Of the Eagle-bearers of four regiments at Aspern, the 2nd, 16th,
+37th, and 67th of the Line, not one came through the day alive, but
+the Eagles were saved. They were the four regiments that took the
+village of Aspern and held it all day and till after dark--12,000
+men against 80,000 enemies. The village was the all-important key of
+the battlefield. Its defence was of supreme moment, for only part of
+Napoleon’s army had been able to get across the Danube as yet, the main
+bridge of boats having been broken down and swept away.
+
+They had seized Aspern at the outset, but had been forced to fall back
+before an Austrian counter-attack, returning after that to recapture
+it, and hold it until the end.
+
+Marshal Masséna led the onset that retook the village. “The Austrians,”
+describes a French officer, “had entered Aspern, and it was absolutely
+necessary to dislodge them. Masséna therefore, who had had all his
+horses killed, marched on foot with drawn sword at the head of the
+Grenadiers of the Molitor division, forced his way into the village,
+crowded as it was with Austrians, drove them out, and pursued them
+for some twelve or fourteen yards beyond the houses. But here the
+French troops found themselves face to face with the strong force
+under Hiller, Bellegarde, and Hohenzollern, advancing rapidly in their
+direction. It was hopeless for the division to attempt to engage such
+superior numbers in the open plain, so Masséna recalled the pursuers,
+and ordered them to hold Aspern. The enemy, ashamed apparently of this
+first defeat, returned to the charge with 80,000 men and more than a
+hundred pieces of cannon, which were soon pointed on the village.”
+
+[Sidenote: AT BAY IN THE BURNING VILLAGE]
+
+It was impossible to stop the onrush of the Austrians. In spite of
+every effort of Masséna, who with his artillery “opened fire upon
+the densely packed masses of men, every shot working terrible havoc
+amongst them,” they swarmed forward to the outskirts of the village.
+A life-and-death struggle in defence began. “In a very few minutes
+the village was completely surrounded by troops; and hidden from view
+in the dense clouds of smoke from the cannon, the musketry, and the
+fires which at once broke out, the combatants, almost suffocated by
+the smoke, crossed bayonets without being able to see each other; but
+neither side gave way a step, and for more than an hour the terrible
+attack and desperate defence went on amongst the ruins of the burning
+houses.”
+
+It was during the Austrian opening attack on the outskirts of Aspern
+that at one point a French regiment--the number of the regiment is not
+given in any account--was forced apart from the rest, and driven back
+in disorder beyond the village. Its colonel was killed, and, though
+the Eagle was kept from falling into the enemy’s hands, the regiment
+fell back in confusion. Napoleon witnessed the check and galloped to
+intercept the troops as they were retreating. Riding into the midst
+of the fugitives, he personally rallied them, and then called angrily
+for the colonel. There was no answer from any one, and in high anger
+Napoleon again called for the colonel. Then somebody made the reply
+that the colonel was dead. “I know that!” answered Napoleon sharply. “I
+asked where he was!” “We left him in the village.” “What! you left your
+colonel’s body in the hands of the enemy? Go back instantly, find it,
+and remember that a good regiment should always be able to produce both
+its Colonel and its Eagle!” Napoleon’s stinging rebuke did its work.
+The men at once re-formed and turned back. Charging forward with a
+rush, they forced their way through to where the colonel had fallen and
+recovered the body. Then they joined in with the other defenders at the
+village, and did their duty to the end. The colonel’s body was brought
+back and laid before Napoleon next morning.
+
+[Sidenote: MARSHAL MASSENA UNDER FIRE]
+
+The fearful contest in Aspern went on until four in the afternoon, by
+which time the Austrians had succeeded in taking half the village. They
+could not, however, get beyond that. “Masséna still held the church and
+cemetery, and was struggling to regain what he had lost. Five times
+in less than three hours he took and retook the cemetery, the church,
+and the village, without being able to call to his aid the Legrand
+division, which he was obliged to hold in reserve to cover Aspern on
+the right and keep the enemy from getting in on that side. Throughout
+this awful struggle Masséna stood beneath the great elms on the green
+opposite the church, calmly indifferent to the fall of the branches
+brought down upon his head by the showers of grape-shot and bullets,
+keenly alive to all that was going on, his look and voice, stern as the
+_quos ego_ of Virgil’s angry Neptune, inspiring all who surrounded him
+with irresistible strength.”
+
+Even when the sun went down “the struggle was far from being over,
+and the awful battle was still raging in the streets and behind the
+walls of the village of Aspern. The enemy, irritated at the stubborn
+resistance of so small a body of troops, redoubled their efforts to
+dislodge them before nightfall, and went on fighting by the light of
+the conflagrations alone. The history of our wars relates no more
+thrilling incident than this long and obstinate struggle, in which
+our troops, disheartened by the ever-fresh difficulties with which
+they had to contend, worn out by fatigue, and horrified by the carnage
+round them, were kept at their posts by the example and exhortations of
+Masséna and his officers alone. General Molitor had lost some half of
+his men, and the enemy were hurrying up from every side. The struggle
+was maintained under these terrible conditions until eleven o’clock,
+when we remained masters of Aspern and of the whole line between it and
+Essling.”
+
+Five regiments of the French Army of to-day commemorate a splendid
+Eagle-incident in the name “Wagram, 1809,” on their colours; the final
+charge of Macdonald’s column which saved and decided the battle for
+Napoleon, besides gaining a marshal’s bâton for the Scottish officer
+who achieved the feat. That was on the final battlefield of Wagram
+itself, the outcome of which tremendous encounter settled the fate
+of the war. It was the culminating event of the battle. The crisis
+was at hand for both armies when the order was given to Macdonald to
+go forward. On the Austrian side the powerful and fresh corps of the
+Archduke John was rapidly nearing the scene, and the fortune of the day
+yet wavered in the balance. Napoleon, as his last hope and final effort
+to break the stubborn Austrian array of the Archduke Charles’ host
+which still confronted him, defiant still after ten hours of charges
+and counter-charges, holding out tenaciously in a strong position,
+massed his reserves and sent them at the centre of the Austrians, to
+press forward in a vast column of closely formed battalions. They went
+at the enemy with all the daring of a forlorn hope.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Sidenote: MACDONALDS’S COLUMN ADVANCES]
+
+“Moving steadily forward through the wreck of guns, the dead, and
+the dying, this undaunted column, preceded by its terrific battery
+incessantly firing, pushed on half a league beyond the front at other
+points of the enemy’s line. In proportion as it advanced, however,
+it became enveloped in fire; the guns were gradually dismounted or
+silenced, and the infantry emerged through their wreck to the front.
+The Austrians drew off their front line upon their second, and both,
+falling back, formed a sort of wall on each side of the French column,
+from whence issued a dreadful fire of grape and musketry on either
+flank of the assailants. Still Macdonald pushed on with unconquerable
+resolution: in the midst of a frightful storm of bullets his ranks were
+unshaken; the destiny of Europe was in his hands, and he was worthy of
+the mission. The loss he experienced, however, was enormous; at every
+step huge chasms were made in his ranks, whole files were struck down
+by cannon-shot, and at length his eight dense battalions were reduced
+to 1,500 men. Isolated in the midst of enemies, this band of heroes was
+compelled to halt. The Empire rocked to its foundations: it was the
+rout of a similar body of the Guard at Waterloo that hurled Napoleon to
+the rock of St. Helena.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE BATTLE WON AT LAST]
+
+The five regiments which formed the spear-point of the attack had
+paraded that morning 6,000 strong. They numbered now, the survivors,
+less than 300. They were at the extreme point of the advance, but were
+held fast and unable to go farther. The enemy were on every side of
+them, for in the last moments they had pressed on beyond touch of the
+troops that were following next. The Austrians saw their chance to
+charge them and annihilate them before the approach of French supports
+to the main column could get near. But General Broussier, the Brigadier
+in command of the leading troops, knew his work and his men. As they
+halted he rapidly rallied the fragments of the nearest regiments and
+formed them in a single square. They drew up under the _feu d’enfer_
+of cannon and musketry, three deep in front, with, in the centre, held
+up on high, the five Eagles of the regiments; so as not to weaken the
+front, the firing line, “the Eagles were held up only by men who had
+been wounded.” Broussier marked the massing of the Eagles in the midst;
+and, as the firing round them for one moment seemed to lull, raising
+his voice, he called out for all to hear: “Soldiers, swear to die here
+to the last man round your Eagles!” “Jurez moi, soldats, de mourir
+tous, jusqu’au dernier, autour de vos Aigles!” were the Brigadier’s
+words. But there was fortunately no need for all to die. At that moment
+reinforcing troops came up, with the Young Guard at their head. The
+column, on that, moved forward again with a steady front, “and the
+Archduke, despairing now of maintaining his position, when assailed at
+the crisis of the day by such a formidable accession of force in the
+now broken part of his line, gave directions for a general retreat.”
+The Eagles had done their part and the battle of Wagram was won.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+“THE EAGLE WITH THE GOLDEN WREATH” IN LONDON
+
+
+There are thirteen of Napoleon’s Eagles in England, among the trophies
+of the British Army at Chelsea Royal Hospital; or, to speak strictly,
+twelve Eagles and a “dummy” Eagle, the later reproduction of a very
+famous trophy, gone now, unfortunately, to the melting-pot of a
+thieves’ kitchen. It is with the dummy Eagle, as it may be called
+for short, without disrespect to its gallant custodians, and five of
+the twelve Eagles at Chelsea, that we are for the immediate moment
+concerned. That represents the first of Napoleon’s trophies won by
+British soldiers in hand-to-hand fight--the once celebrated “Eagle with
+the Golden Wreath.”
+
+The story opens on Saturday morning, May 18, 1811, a day that was a
+great occasion for Londoners. For the first time, on that Saturday,
+trophies taken from Napoleon were publicly displayed in the British
+Capital, and no pains were spared to make the most of the event. An
+elaborate and dramatic ceremonial was ordained for the occasion by the
+authorities at the instance of the Prince Regent. It was like nothing
+else of the kind ever witnessed or heard of in England before.
+
+[Sidenote: WHAT LONDON HAD SEEN BEFORE]
+
+On many another day in bygone times London had been the scene of
+stately martial pageants in which the victor’s spoils from many
+battlefields were borne in triumph, amid blare of trumpets and
+clash of drums, to be deposited with due ceremony in their allotted
+resting-places. So had it been when the Marlborough trophies from
+Blenheim and Ramillies, the captured flags from Dettingen, Louisburg,
+and Minden, were borne along the crowded streets, preceded by bands
+playing triumphant music and accompanied by armed escorts of Foot and
+Horse. Another Saturday, seventeen years before, May 17, 1794, had been
+the last occasion of trophy-flags being displayed in London, when the
+captured French Republican standards of the garrison of Martinique were
+publicly carried through the streets by Life Guards and Grenadiers,
+with the band of the First Guards leading the way and the Tower guns
+booming out an artillery _feu de joie_, from St. James’s Palace to St.
+Paul’s, to be received at the great west doors of the Cathedral by the
+Dean and Chapter, and laid up “as a lasting memorial of the success of
+his Majesty’s Arms.” Some of the flags then displayed hang in the Hall
+of Chelsea Hospital to-day.
+
+So, too, had it been in London in yet earlier times, in the far off,
+unhappy days of Civil War in England, when the citizens of those
+periods, in turn, saw the spoils of Bosworth, and of Marston Moor and
+Naseby, of Worcester, Preston, and Dunbar, paraded through their midst,
+escorted by mail-clad men-at-arms, on the way to be hung up exultingly
+in St. Paul’s Cathedral or in Westminster Hall. With his own Royal
+banners from Marston Moor and Naseby drooping down overhead from the
+roof of Westminster Hall, Charles the First faced his judges and heard
+his fate. But never before in London had so elaborately designed a
+ceremony attended the display of trophies taken from any enemy, as that
+planned for the _Royal Depositum_, as it was officially styled, of the
+first of the captured Eagles of Napoleon to be received in England.
+
+There was to be a special display of trophies the London newspapers
+announced some days beforehand. The newspapers had not spared
+themselves in working up public interest. At the outset they had told
+how, on the night of March 24, Captain Hope, First A.D.C. to General
+Graham, had arrived in London with the Barrosa despatches and a “French
+Eagle with a wreath of gold,” which, it was stated, “the general
+trusted his aide de camp might be permitted to lay at his Majesty’s
+feet.” Then Londoners were informed that the Barrosa Eagle was a trophy
+of unusual importance, and was being kept at the War Office, to be
+presented to the Prince Regent at the next _levée_. It was announced a
+week later that his Royal Highness had been so desirous of seeing it at
+once, that the War Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, instead of waiting
+five weeks for the _levée_, had already presented it to the Prince at
+Carlton House. On that came the official notification that “the Eagle
+with the Golden Wreath,” as the trophy was everywhere styled, together
+with a number of other French trophies, which had been previously
+received and had been some time stored away at the War Office
+pending instructions as to their disposal, would be deposited in the
+Chapel Royal, Whitehall, (now the Museum of the Royal United Service
+Institution). “The _Royal Depositum_ ceremony will be very grand, and
+the martial music appropriate to the occasion, and as the orders have
+been issued by direction of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent,
+the Chapel will be thronged with nobility.” So one journal notified;
+another remarking that “in addition to the great religious and military
+ceremony, an anthem is to be performed after the manner of the Te Deum.”
+
+[Sidenote: A GRAND MARTIAL CEREMONY]
+
+Thus popular interest was aroused and kept alive in advance, and the
+selected Saturday morning proving fine and pleasant, with the prospect
+of a genial and sunny forenoon, Londoners turned out in large numbers
+to see the show.
+
+To the Brigade of Guards it fell to carry out the ceremony of the
+military reception of the Eagles.
+
+The “Parade in St. James’s Park,” which we know now as the Horse
+Guards Parade, was the appointed place for the display, and as the
+clock struck nine the preliminaries opened with the arrival of a large
+body of Guards’ recruits who were to keep the ground. From quite an
+early hour a crowd had been gathering there and along the side of the
+Park. Soon afterwards the first of the troops designated to attend the
+ceremony began to arrive. These were several companies of the First
+Guards and Coldstreamers “in undress, with side arms.” They formed line
+along either side of the parade-ground; on one side “extending from
+the corner of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s garden to the Egyptian
+gun”; on the opposite side, “from the Admiralty towards the Park.”
+To right and left of the archway under the Horse Guards leading to
+Whitehall were drawn up the “recruiting parties stationed in the Home
+District.”
+
+At a quarter to ten came on the scene the first of the actors in
+the day’s proceedings, the “King’s Guard” of the day, “in their
+best uniforms, and with sprigs of oak and laurel in their hats.”
+Marching up, headed by the combined bands of the First Guards and the
+Coldstreamers, with the regimental colour of the First Guards, they
+formed on the right, along the open side of the square, facing towards
+the Horse Guards. Following them, a few moments later, came the picked
+detachment appointed as the “trophy-escort,” furnished jointly by the
+grenadier companies of the First Guards and the Coldstreamers. All
+were in review-order full dress, “wearing long white gaiters, with oak
+and laurel leaves in their hats.” A captain of the First Guards was
+in command; and the detachment was made up of two subalterns, four
+sergeants, and ninety-six rank and file. They took post on the left
+of the King’s Guard. As the trophy-escort halted, up came another
+detachment of Guards, a hundred strong, with the Life Guards; marching
+across the square and through the Horse Guards archway to line the way
+thence to the doors of the Chapel Royal.
+
+[Sidenote: GETTING READY FOR THE PRINCES]
+
+Towards ten o’clock privileged spectators were admitted within the
+square, “to stand at an appointed spot”: several veteran generals, “in
+their best uniforms and powdered,” as a newspaper reporter remarks;
+Lord Liverpool the War Minister; the Earl Marshal; the Speaker; the
+Spanish and Portuguese Ambassadors, both gorgeously attired; and “a
+number of beautiful and elegant ladies of distinction.”
+
+The Horse Guards clock struck ten, and as the last clanging stroke died
+away “the authorities” came clattering on to the ground on horseback:
+Sir David Dundas, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Governor of
+Chelsea Hospital, at the head of a number of other plumed and
+cocked-hatted generals in full uniform, together with the Head-quarters
+Staff at the Horse Guards. Prominent in the glittering array of
+gold-laced red coats, “mounted on a cream-coloured Arab,” was General
+Sir John Doyle, Colonel of the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers; the regiment
+whose prowess at Barrosa had won the great trophy of the day--“the
+Eagle with the Golden Wreath.”
+
+With Royal punctuality, as the clock chimed the half-hour, amid cheers
+from the crowd and the spectators filling the windows of the Horse
+Guards and Admiralty and other Government offices overlooking the
+ground, came riding up the three Princes who were to preside at the
+ceremony--the Dukes of York, Cambridge, and Gloucester.
+
+The display began forthwith.
+
+Preceded by the two Guards’ bands playing the “Grenadiers’ March,”
+the trophy-escort of grenadiers crossed the Parade at a slow step,
+and marched in four divisions, or “platoons,” to the old Tilt Yard
+orderly-room under the Horse Guards. There the trophies had been taken
+beforehand to be in readiness for the ceremony. The grenadiers halted
+before the doors, and the trophies, twelve in number, were brought
+out by Lifeguardsmen from the Tilt Yard Guard and committed to the
+charge of twelve picked sergeants--six of the First Guards, six of the
+Coldstreamers--selected to bear them to the Chapel Royal.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CAPTURED EAGLES TAKE POST]
+
+The trophy-bearers carrying the Eagles then took post according to the
+date of the capture of each trophy; the earliest taken of the Eagles
+leading. In advance of all, immediately after the band, marched the
+three officers with swords drawn; the captain and the two subalterns.
+Then, with their flanking grenadiers as escort, a file to each trophy,
+came, one after the other, three Battalion Eagles of Napoleon’s 82nd
+of the Line, surrendered at the capitulation of Martinique in 1809.
+Immediately in rear marched No. 1 platoon of grenadiers; in the
+interval between the first trophy-group and the second. That consisted
+of the Regimental Eagle of the French 26th of the Line, surrendered at
+Martinique at the same time as the Eagles of the 82nd, and then that
+of the 66th of the Line, surrendered at the capitulation of Guadaloupe
+in 1810, with, just behind them, the all-important trophy of the day,
+the first Napoleonic Eagle captured--or, at any rate, taken possession
+of--by British soldiers on the battlefield: “the Eagle with the Golden
+Wreath”--that Eagle of Napoleon’s 8th Regiment of the Line, won in
+hand-to-hand fight by the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at Barrosa.
+
+Five of the Eagles had their silken tricolor flags still attached to
+the poles. The Barrosa Eagle had none: it showed simply a bare pole
+topped by the wreathed Eagle. The wreath, according to a newspaper
+reporter present, was “an honour conferred on the regiment for fine
+conduct at the battle of Talavera, where they were opposed to the 87th;
+and, by a singular coincidence of circumstances, these regiments met in
+conflict at Barrosa and recognised each other.” As we shall see, the
+statement was a freak of journalistic imagination, without a scrap of
+fact behind the story, although, strangely, the legend holds to this
+day and reappears periodically in print. Adds the reporter, as to the
+appearance of the Eagle, recording this time what he actually saw: “The
+Eagle is fixed on a square pedestal, and standing erect on one foot;
+the other raised as if grasping something; its wings expanded. It is
+about the size of a small pigeon, and appears to be made of bronze, or
+of some composition like pinchbeck, gold-gilt.” The “something” which
+the talons of the Eagle appeared to be grasping was the “thunderbolt,”
+which was missing, having been either knocked out of its place in the
+scuffle on the battlefield, or stolen later by somebody for a relic.
+The wreath was really of gold. A couple of its leaves picked up on
+the field after the battle and given to Major Hugh Gough, the gallant
+commander of the 87th at Barrosa, are now in possession of one of that
+officer’s descendants.
+
+[Illustration: Plan of the Battle of BARROSA]
+
+The second grenadier platoon divided the Eagles from the first three of
+the flag-trophies, borne in file, one by one, in the same way as the
+Eagles. The first in date of capture led; a French Republican standard
+taken in fight at Sir Ralph Abercombie’s victory at Alexandria, ten
+years before, and kept ever since at the War Office: “the Invincible’s
+standard.” “As it is falsely called,” adds the reporter; right for
+once. “So tattered is it,” he continues, “that the mottoes are
+not legible; a bugle in the centre was the only figure we could
+distinguish.” Two flags taken by Wellington’s men in the Peninsula
+accompanied the Alexandria flag: “a Fort Standard,” as it is described,
+and the battalion colour, or “fanion,” of the Second Battalion of
+Napoleon’s 5th of the Line.[23]
+
+[Sidenote: THE TROPHY FLAGS PARADED]
+
+In rear of the colour of the 5th marched the third grenadier platoon,
+and the last three trophies sent to England by Wellington. Two were
+a pair of tattered German standards, the flags of the two battalions
+of a Prussian regiment in Napoleon’s service, composed of unfortunate
+soldiers levied compulsorily during the French occupation of their
+country, and tramped off to Spain to meet their fate under British
+bullets. Each flag bore the legend “L’Empereur des Français au Régiment
+Prussien” on one side, and “Valeur et Discipline” on the other, and was
+mounted on a staff with a steel pike-head instead of an Eagle. They
+were silken flags of the ordinary Napoleonic pattern. The third flag
+of the group was that of a “provisional regiment”; also with a steel
+pike-head to its staff.
+
+From the Tilt Yard orderly-room the trophies and their escort-guard
+set off, as before, in slow time, the bands playing “God save the
+King!” The sergeants, carrying the Eagles and Flags between the files
+of grenadiers, marched in the intervals between the four divisions “in
+double open-order with arms advanced.” Right round the square they now
+passed, close along the lines of the troops drawn up, “the immense
+multitude rending the air with huzzas.” In front of the First Guards,
+in front of the recruiting parties, in front of the long line of
+Coldstreamers, along each of the three sides of the square, paced the
+procession with martial pomp to the stately music of the two bands as
+they led the way. Then it proceeded along the fourth side of the square
+until it came face to face with the King’s Guard, all standing with
+ordered arms, not at the present.
+
+There was a brief pause in front of the Colour of the King’s Guard.
+
+That was the supreme moment of the display. Now took place the formal
+act of obeisance to the victors; the formal act of abasement and
+humiliation for the vanquished. Amid redoubled cheering from all sides,
+the Eagles and the other flags were, one and all, formally dipped and
+prostrated. “The captured standards saluted and were lowered to the
+ground in token of submission.”
+
+[Sidenote: PROSTRATED IN THE DUST]
+
+The procession turned away in front of the King’s Guard and led round
+in front of the three Royal Dukes, seated on their chargers, a little
+in advance of the Commander-in-Chief and Horse Guards Staff, at the
+centre of the parade-ground. Again, as they now passed before the Royal
+trio, the hapless Eagles of Napoleon and the other French flags in turn
+were one by one made to pay homage, bowed grovelling to the dust; the
+crowd of onlookers shouting themselves hoarse “with,” as we are told,
+“truly British huzzas.”
+
+After that the trophy procession marched across to the Horse Guards
+archway, and through to Whitehall and the Chapel Royal; between Life
+Guards on one side and more Foot Guards on the other, drawn up to keep
+a lane open through the immense crowd of people who had gathered there,
+and thronged the wide roadway. “The procession,” says our reporter,
+“moved off the Parade amid the acclamations of many thousand spectators
+and entered the Chapel as the clock was striking eleven, which [_sic_]
+was crowded by all the beauty and fashion in Town.” Another reporter
+speaks of the Chapel Royal as being “exceedingly crowded in all parts
+with nobility and gentlemen and ladies of distinction.”
+
+“The religious part of the ceremony,” we are told, “was solemn and
+impressive.” It comprised Morning Prayer and a sermon by the Sub-Dean.
+“Previous to the commencement of the Te Deum, a pause was made, when
+three grenadier sergeants entered at each door by the sides of the
+Altar with the Eagles on black poles about 8 feet high. They took
+their stations in front of the Altar. Each party was guarded by a
+file of grenadiers, commanded by two officers; the whole of them with
+laurel-leaves in their caps as emblems of Victory. At the same instant
+the five French flags and Bonaparte’s honourable standard entered
+the upper gallery at the back of the Altar, all carried by grenadier
+sergeants.
+
+“The whole remained presented for some time for the gratification of
+the beholders, after which the Eagles were placed in brass sockets on
+each side of the Altar, suspended by brass chains. The five flags
+were suspended from the front of the second gallery, and Bonaparte’s
+honourable standard placed over the door of the second gallery, behind
+the others.”
+
+The trophies, with others won at Salamanca and Waterloo, and
+subsequently laid up in the Chapel Royal, were removed later to Chelsea
+Royal Hospital, where all, except “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath,”
+are now kept treasured amid befitting surroundings.
+
+[Sidenote: STOLEN FROM CHELSEA AT MIDDAY]
+
+“The Eagle with the Golden Wreath” disappeared from Chelsea Hospital
+in broad daylight. It was displayed in the Chapel, affixed in front of
+the organ-loft over the doorway, until it suddenly vanished from there
+a little after midday on Friday, April 16, 1852, in the absence of the
+pensioner-custodian of the Chapel during the Hospital dinner-hour. How
+it was stolen was apparent; but the thief was never traced. The thief,
+attracted undoubtedly by the widely told story that the wreath was of
+gold, made his way into the Chapel by the roof, which was undergoing
+repairs at the time, to which he got access by a workman’s ladder. He
+got inside by the trap-door on the leads above the organ-loft. There,
+with a saw, he cut through the Eagle-pole near where it was fastened
+to the organ-loft, and, secreting it under his coat, made his escape
+by the way he had come, unseen by anybody. The Eagle-pole was found
+outside, in front of the building, with the Eagle and wreath wrenched
+off. For some reason the Royal Hospital authorities of the day offered
+a reward of only a sovereign, and though the London police did their
+best, the malefactor was never discovered.[24]
+
+At Barrosa Napoleon’s 8th of the Line was in the French column that
+made its attack on the right. It was one of the regiments that charged
+forward across the plain at the foot of Barrosa ridge, to break through
+General Graham’s second brigade and drive it back to the edge of the
+cliffs by the seashore, while the French left attack seized the ridge
+itself, and beat back the British first brigade in the act of hastening
+to regain that unwisely abandoned position. The Eagle went down in the
+fierce counter-attack with which Graham’s men on the plain, the 87th
+Royal Irish Fusiliers in the front line, met the French onset.
+
+[Sidenote: “IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP THEM”]
+
+What befell the 8th of the Line is told by one of their own officers in
+his _Journal de Guerre_--Lieutenant-Colonel Vigo-Roussillon, in command
+of the First Battalion, with which was the Eagle.
+
+Just before the critical moment, says Colonel Roussillon, the 8th,
+who were on the flank of the French second line, lost touch with
+the regiment next them, and had in consequence to meet the 87th by
+themselves. They fired their hardest as the British troops came on,
+“but could not stop them, ever advancing to a bayonet attack.”
+
+They came on silently, steadily, irresistibly. “Their officers,” adds
+one of Victor’s staff, “kept up all the time the old custom of striking
+with their canes those of the men who fell out of the ranks. Our own
+non-commissioned officers,” he adds, “placed as a supernumerary rank,
+crossed their muskets behind the squads, thus forming buttresses which
+kept the ranks from giving way. Several of the French officers, also,
+picked up the muskets of the wounded, and flung themselves into the
+gaps made in the ranks of the men.”
+
+“I saw the English line,” describes Colonel Roussillon again, “at sixty
+paces continuing to advance at a slow step without firing. It seemed
+impossible to stop them; we had not sufficient men.”
+
+Apparently he then caught sight of General Graham, leading the British
+line.
+
+“Under the influence of a sort of despair, I urged forward my charger,
+a strong Polish horse, against an English mounted officer who seemed
+to be the colonel of the nearest regiment coming on at us. I got up to
+him, and was about to run him through with my sword, when I was held
+back by a sense of compassion and abandoned the murderous thought. He
+was an officer with white hair and a fine figure, and had his hat in
+his hand, and was cheering on his men. His calmness and noble air of
+dignity irresistibly arrested my arm.”
+
+Such is the lieutenant-colonel’s own account. But did he really get
+quite close to the general? Graham was the last man in the world to let
+him get back unfought!
+
+“I then,” as Vigo-Roussillon continues, “quickly galloped back to my
+own men, and was riding along the line, telling them to meet the enemy
+with our bayonets, and drive them back, when a bullet from an English
+marksman broke my right leg.
+
+“I managed to dismount and tried to pass through in rear of the line,
+but it was impossible to walk. The ground was covered with thick
+bushes, and I was crippled and in great pain. All I could do was to sit
+down where I was, calling on the men to fire again. A moment later I
+was enveloped in smoke; and at the same instant the English charged in
+among us.
+
+“I called out my loudest, cheering on my men; and now two soldiers
+tried to lift me up and carry me. But both were shot down.
+
+“For the time we held our own, and kept the enemy back; but some of the
+English got round us. Seeing themselves outflanked, the battalion began
+to give ground. Then came a second furious charge from the English, and
+that broke us.”
+
+[Sidenote: “FIGHTING WITH THEIR FISTS”]
+
+The fight, man to man, went on desperately for several minutes--some of
+the British soldiers, as yet another French officers relates, fighting
+with their fists. “Many of the Englishmen broke their weapons in
+striking with the butts or bayonets; but they never seemed to think of
+using the swords they wore at their sides. They went on fighting with
+their fists.”
+
+It was in the final _mêlée_ that “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was
+taken; after a sharp and fierce hand-to-hand fight round it.
+
+Colonel Roussillon himself was at almost the same moment struck
+down, and lay insensible for a space among the dead near by. He was
+recovering his senses and trying to stand up, when, as he tells, a
+British sergeant saw him and ran at him with his halberd. He parried
+the thrust, and kept the sergeant off, and then a British officer came
+up. To him the Commandant of the First Battalion of the 8th surrendered
+his sword.
+
+The fight for the Eagle--on one hand to take it, on the other to keep
+it--was furious; desperately and heroically contested by both sides.
+
+First, a gallant Irish boy, from Kilkenny, Ensign Edward Keogh of the
+87th, caught sight of it, borne on high above the fray. There had been
+no unscrewing of the Eagle of the 8th, no trying to break it from its
+pole. “See that Eagle, sergeant!” called Keogh to Sergeant Masterton,
+among the foremost, close by his officer; and then he dashed straight
+into the thick of the party round the Eagle, sword in hand. The brave
+lad cut his way through, with Masterton and four or five privates close
+behind him. He got close up to the “Porte-Aigle,” crossed swords with
+him, and got a grip of the Eagle-pole. But he could not wrench it from
+the no less brave Frenchman’s hands before he went down with half a
+dozen musket bullets and bayonet stabs in his body.
+
+Porte-Aigle Guillemin, as the gallant French Eagle-bearer of the 8th
+was named, fell dead at the same moment, shot through the head by one
+of the British privates.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW THE TUSSLE ENDED]
+
+Instantly other Frenchmen rushed up to save the Eagle, and formed round
+it hastily. One of the British privates who seized hold of the staff
+was slashed to death, and the French recovered it. The fight round
+the Eagle went on for some minutes. In that time no fewer than seven
+French officers and sub-officers fell dead in defence of the Eagle.
+An eighth officer, Lieutenant Gazan, clung to the pole to the last,
+regardless of wounds that nearly hacked him to pieces. Finally the
+Eagle was torn from his grasp by Sergeant Masterton, at the end the
+sole unwounded survivor of the attacking British party. Gazan “survived
+miraculously,” and lived to be decorated by Napoleon for his devoted
+courage. Masterton seized the Eagle and kept it. So “the Eagle with the
+Golden Wreath” became a British trophy.
+
+From the crossing of the bayonets in the final charge to the taking of
+the Eagle, the _mêlée_ lasted about fifteen minutes.
+
+The remnant of the 8th were saved by a rally to the spot by the French
+54th, after another regiment, the 47th, had attempted its rescue in
+vain. The 47th lost their Eagle in the _mêlée_, but recovered it. “The
+man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it away, from excessive
+fatigue and a wound,” explains a British officer. The 8th lost at
+Barrosa their Colonel (Autié) and the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second
+Battalion, killed; Vigo-Roussillon, of the First Battalion, wounded;
+and 17 other officers and 934 of the rank and file killed or wounded.
+The _Moniteur_, the official Paris newspaper under the Napoleonic
+_régime_, in reporting the battle of April 5, referred to the loss of
+the Eagle in these terms: “A battalion of the 8th, having been charged
+in wood-covered ground, and the Eagle-bearer being killed, his Eagle
+has not been found since.”
+
+The battalion that fared so hardly had to pay the regulation penalty.
+Napoleon gave the 8th no other Eagle. He held rigidly to his rule, and
+set his face relentlessly against a second presentation. They must
+present him first with a standard taken on the battlefield from the
+enemy. But with Wellington’s men opposed to them to the end, the 8th
+got few chances in that direction. They had to fight without an Eagle
+to the close of the Peninsular War.
+
+Two days after Barrosa, when General Graham re-entered Cadiz with the
+Spanish army, “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was publicly paraded
+through the crowded streets, “between the regimental colours,” as the
+87th marched to barracks, the church bells ringing triumphantly, and
+amid exultant shouts and cheers of the populace, and cries of “Long
+live Spain! Death to our oppressors!” At the barracks “we presented the
+Eagle to our gallant commander,” says one of the officers.
+
+The Eagle was then sent to England in the custody of the officer
+carrying General Graham’s despatch. Its capture is commemorated to this
+day by the Royal Irish Fusiliers, who wear “an Eagle with a Wreath of
+Laurel” as a regimental badge, while a similar Eagle is embroidered
+in gold on the regimental colour. Also, a representation of the
+wreathed Barrosa Eagle was granted later on as a special augmentation
+to the family arms of the officer who commanded the 87th in the
+battle, Major Hugh Gough, on his being raised to the Peerage while
+Commander-in-Chief in India after the first Sikh War. “The Aiglers” was
+always the regiment’s sobriquet after Barrosa among their comrades in
+Wellington’s army; a sobriquet that has endured since then in the form
+of “the Aigle-Takers,” although our modern recruits are said to prefer
+calling themselves “the Bird-Catchers.”[25]
+
+[Sidenote: ONE OF THE PARIS WREATHS]
+
+It was in this way that the Barrosa trophy Eagle came by its golden
+wreath. The decoration, as has been said, had nothing to do with
+Talavera.
+
+The wreath was one of those voted by the City of Paris to the regiments
+that had gone through the Jena and Polish frontier campaigns, the first
+of which was presented to the Imperial Guard. First of all, in the
+outburst of patriotic enthusiasm in France at the news of Jena, wreaths
+had been voted as decorations for the Eagles, by way of popular tribute
+to the regiments which had helped in dealing that staggering blow to
+the famous Prussian Army. After the crowning victory of Friedland
+which ended the war, in a fresh outburst of enthusiasm, golden wreaths
+were voted wholesale for the Eagles of all the corps that had taken
+part in the fighting that followed Jena, during the nine months of
+war, down to the final day of Friedland. It was a costly guerdon, and
+their proposed generosity staggered the Paris municipality when the
+estimate was presented. No fewer than 378 wreaths--according to the
+official return--had to be provided. But the vote had been carried by
+acclamation on its first proposal, and trumpeted all over France. Also,
+the Emperor had taken up with the idea warmly. The Paris authorities
+dared not back out, and had to go on with it in spite of the cost. They
+carried it out with so good a grace that, as the sequel, a suggestion
+came from the Tuileries that the Austerlitz battalions of the Grand
+Army which had not had the fortune to be in the Jena-Friedland campaign
+should receive wreaths as well, an Imperial hint that the authorities,
+shrinking from the extra expense, were so slow to fall in with, that
+in the end it had to be forced on them, by means of a bluntly worded
+letter through the Ministry of War. “Tell the Prefect of the Seine,”
+wrote Napoleon to the War Minister, “that I expect wreaths of gold,
+similar to those given for Jena and Friedland, to be provided on behalf
+of the City of Paris for all the regiments at Austerlitz!”
+
+[Sidenote: ACROSS GERMANY IN CARTS]
+
+The 8th was presented with its wreath in Paris, while on the way to
+take part in the Peninsular War. It was one of the regiments of the
+First Corps of the Grand Army, which Napoleon hastily recalled from
+Germany in the spring of 1808, and hurried across Europe to reinforce
+the troops in Spain on the first news of serious trouble being on foot
+in that quarter. The whole First Army Corps was recalled; starting
+from Berlin, where it had been quartered, and journeying by Magdeburg
+and Coblentz. Along the route the unfortunate German burgomasters and
+village authorities had to provide, not only provisions day by day, but
+transport vehicles for 30,000 soldiers; mostly farm-carts and wagons,
+each taking from four to sixteen men. The troops travelled by night and
+day, with only two stoppages of fifty minutes each in the twenty-four
+hours, for meals, and the authorities of the villages and towns named
+as halting-places were compelled to have hot food kept ready so that
+the men might fall to instantly on arrival. It was a journey the
+soldiers never forgot. The weather was rough and wet, the roads in
+places were almost impassable, and the carts continually broke down, in
+addition to which the peasant-drivers requisitioned for the conveyances
+deserted at every opportunity, usually going off at night with the
+horses after cutting the traces, leaving their wagon-loads of sleeping
+soldiers stranded by the roadside.
+
+The 8th received its wreath at the Barrier of Pantin, on the outskirts
+of Paris. It arrived with the Second Division of the corps, and
+the troops were met by the Prefect of the Seine and the Municipal
+Council in State, while Marshal Victor, the commander of the Army
+Corps, attended the ceremony in full-dress uniform. He replied to the
+Prefect’s complimentary address by declaring that “these golden crowns
+henceforward decorating the Eagles of the First Corps will to them ever
+be additional incentives to victory.” One by one the regiments passed
+before the Prefect, who hung round each Eagle’s neck “a wreath of gold,
+shaped as two branches of laurel.” A triumphal march into Paris and an
+open-air banquet to all ranks in the Tivoli Gardens, with free tickets
+to the theatres after it, wound up the day.
+
+All along the line of march through France to the Spanish frontier,
+banquets and elaborate festivities welcomed the regiments--and at the
+same time, it would appear, gave some of their entertainers more than
+they bargained for. The triumphal progress, from all accounts, proved
+such hard work for the ladies in the country towns, where public balls
+were in the programme every night, that at some places for the later
+comers--the 8th and other regiments in the Second Division of Marshal
+Victor’s corps--the balls had to be abandoned, “because the ladies were
+too tired to dance any more.” It was explained, with apologies, that
+they had practically been danced off their feet by the regiments of
+the First Division, which had preceded the Second, incessantly passing
+through during the previous three weeks, and that “most of the ladies,
+through sheer fatigue, had taken to their beds!”
+
+[Sidenote: THEY DID NOT MEET AT TALAVERA]
+
+At Talavera, the 8th, as part of a brigade of three regiments, had a
+passage of arms on the battlefield, first with the British 83rd; and
+then with the Guards; lastly with the 48th, before whose magnificent
+charge in the final phase of the fight they had to give ground. They
+did not meet the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at all in the battle.[26]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+OTHER EAGLES IN ENGLAND FROM BATTLEFIELDS OF SPAIN
+
+
+Napoleon’s Eagles made a second appearance before the London populace
+in the following year. That was on September 30, 1812, and the Horse
+Guards Parade was again the scene of the display--this time with more
+elaborate ceremonial, and with the added presence of yet greater
+personages. Queen Charlotte herself this time witnessed the reception
+ceremony, with four of the Princesses; and the Prince Regent in person,
+“mounted on a white charger,” attended, to be publicly done obeisance
+to by the humbled standards of the enemy. Four of his Royal brothers,
+the Dukes of Clarence, York, Cambridge, and Sussex, accompanied the
+Prince Regent. Only the poor old King, blind and insane, was absent of
+the Royal family, remaining in his seclusion at Windsor Castle.
+
+The Queen and Princesses watched the scene from the windows of the
+Levée Room at the Horse Guards, looking down over the Parade; the
+Prince Regent was on the ground and took the salute. The Eagles this
+time were five in number; and four French flags, one of exceptional
+interest, the garrison-standard of Badajoz, were with them in the
+procession.
+
+The military display was on the grandest scale possible; the _ensemble_
+making up, as we are told, “a spectacle grand and impressive beyond
+anything ever beheld.” The First and Second Life Guards were present,
+“drawn up in a line reaching from the Foreign Office nearly to Carlton
+House,” with their bands in State dress and their standards. All three
+regiments of Foot Guards took part, with the State Colour of the First
+Guards, and three bands. Horse and Foot Artillery from Woolwich were
+also there; forming by themselves one side of the great hollow square
+which occupied the wide space of the ground, the scene of the reception
+of “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath.” Ninety grenadiers, drawn from
+the three regiments of Foot Guards, thirty from each, formed the
+trophy-escort, which, as before, accompanied the Eagles and captured
+standards round the square at a slow march--the five Eagles in advance
+by themselves, borne by as many Guards’ sergeants between files of
+grenadiers with fixed bayonets.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES ARE HUMBLED AGAIN]
+
+Again the trophies of Napoleon were spared nothing in the humiliation
+that they had to undergo. Twice were they lowered to the dust before
+the Queen; twice to the Prince Regent; eight times before the standards
+of the Life Guards; three times before the standards of the Guards
+and the King’s Colour of the First Guards, “the immense concourse of
+spectators rending the air with their huzzas” every time the trophies
+went down. Then, as before, the trophies were paraded across Whitehall
+to the Chapel Royal, and solemnly “churched” and hung up there, before
+the Royal family and “all the Cabinet Ministers and the leading members
+of the nobility in London.”
+
+They were this time all Wellington’s trophies. Two of the Eagles
+were spoils from the battle of Salamanca--“dreadfully mutilated and
+disfigured in the conflict,” according to a newspaper reporter’s
+account, “one of them having lost its head, part of the neck, one leg,
+half the thunderbolt, and the distinctive number; the other without one
+leg and the thunderbolt.” Two had been taken in Madrid “in more perfect
+state and without their flags.” The last of the five had been “found on
+the way to Ciudad Rodrigo, in the bed of a river, dried up in summer,
+having been thrown away some months before during Masséna’s retreat.”
+The four Eagles which still bore distinctive numbers were, we are told,
+“those of the 22nd, 13th, and 51st and the 39th.” Of the standards, the
+garrison flag of Badajoz looked “like a sieve, a great part of it quite
+red with human blood”; the four other colours “were so mutilated that
+not a letter or device was legible.”
+
+How we came by the trophies so displayed in London on that Wednesday
+forenoon is our story.
+
+The two Salamanca Eagles were--and are, for they have a place to-day
+among our Chelsea Hospital trophies--mementoes of one of the most
+dramatic episodes of a battle in which there were many.
+
+[Sidenote: WELLINGTON AND SALAMANCA]
+
+Salamanca, it may be said incidentally--the battle, like Waterloo,
+was fought on a Sunday, on July 22, 1812--was, in Wellington’s own
+eyes, his _chef d’œuvre_, his masterpiece, although it may be rather
+overlooked now perhaps by most of us and the world at large, eclipsed
+in the dazzling splendour of the last crowning victory of Waterloo. It
+was at Salamanca that Wellington, in the words of a French officer,
+speaking, of course, in general terms, “defeated 40,000 men in forty
+minutes.” The victory was held in such estimation by Wellington himself
+that he selected it in preference to all his other victories to be
+displayed over again in a sham fight on the Plain of Saint-Denis in the
+presence of the three Allied Sovereigns during the occupation of Paris
+in 1815 after Waterloo. Of it he wrote at the time: “I never saw an
+army receive such a beating.”
+
+Upwards of 6,000 prisoners were taken, including one general and 136
+other officers. Six thousand of the enemy, at the lowest computation,
+were left dead or wounded on the field of battle. Three French
+generals were killed and three wounded. Marshal Marmont himself, the
+enemy’s commander-in-chief, was among the wounded; grievously maimed
+by a bursting shell as he galloped to rally one of his broken columns.
+“Spurring furiously to the point of danger, he was struck by the
+fragment of a shell, which shattered his left arm and tore open his
+side.” Marmont bore the arm in a sling for the rest of his life. He was
+carried off the field under fire, on a stretcher made of a soldier’s
+great-coat with a couple of muskets thrust through the armholes to
+give it shape, under the escort of a squad of grenadiers. Eleven
+cannon--melted down at Woolwich Arsenal in 1820 as a cheap way of
+making new field-guns for the British Army--with the two Eagles and six
+stand of colours, were the trophies of the day.
+
+The two Salamanca trophy Eagles at Chelsea Hospital are the spoils of
+the fiercest cavalry charge that British horsemen ever delivered on a
+battlefield; the death-ride--for 1,200 of Napoleon’s infantry--of the
+Heavy Brigade, which annihilated an entire French division in less
+than a quarter of an hour. It came about as one of the results of that
+opening false move on the part of the French commander which cost
+France in the end the loss of the battle.
+
+[Sidenote: MARMONT’S FATAL BLUNDER]
+
+Marmont, after a series of ably conducted manœuvres in the
+neighbourhood of Salamanca, had forced Wellington, on July 22, into a
+position so unfavourable that the British commander decided to retire
+towards the Portuguese frontier under cover of darkness during the
+following night. But at the last moment the French marshal overreached
+himself. Taking in the difficulties that confronted his opponent he
+attempted to anticipate him and cut him off from his base by barring
+the one line of retreat that was open to Wellington. In doing that,
+Marmont gave his game away. He rashly divided his force in the presence
+of the enemy, separating his left wing to a distance from the main body
+and marching off a whole division of infantry, cavalry, and artillery
+to occupy the road to Ciudad Rodrigo.
+
+The fault was flagrant, and Wellington seized eagerly at the chance all
+unexpectedly offered him. He was at breakfast when Marmont’s troops
+began their false move and the aide de camp whom he had posted on
+the look-out hurriedly came to him with the news. “I think they are
+extending to the left----” the young officer began. He did not finish
+the sentence.
+
+“The devil they are!” interposed Wellington hastily, with his mouth
+full. “Give me the glass!”
+
+He took it, and for nearly a minute scanned the movements of the enemy
+with fixed attention.
+
+“By God!” he ejaculated abruptly as he lowered the glass. “That’ll do!”
+
+He turned to another aide de camp.
+
+“Ride off and tell Clinton and Leith to return to their former ground.”
+These were the generals commanding the Fifth and Sixth Divisions, on
+the right and right-centre of the British position. Then Wellington
+ordered up his horse. Closing his spy-glass with a snap, he turned with
+these words to his Spanish attaché, Colonel Alava: “Mon cher Alava,
+Marmont est perdu!” A moment later Wellington was on horseback and his
+staff also, all galloping off.
+
+Wellington grasped the meaning of Marmont’s move. He saw his chance of
+falling on in force and overpowering the detached French wing before
+help could reach it.
+
+He made his way as fast as his charger could carry him to the British
+Third Division--Picton’s men, temporarily commanded by Wellington’s
+brother-in-law, General Sir Edward Pakenham.
+
+“As he rode up to Pakenham,” says an officer whose regiment was close
+by, “every eye was turned on him. He looked paler than usual, but was
+quite unruffled in his manner, and as calm as if the battle to be
+fought was nothing more than an ordinary assemblage of troops for a
+field-day.”
+
+“Ned,” said Wellington, as he drew rein beside Pakenham, tapping him
+on the shoulder and pointing in the direction of the separated French
+column as its leading troops were beginning to move towards their
+distant position, “Ned, d’ye see those fellows on the hill? Throw your
+division in column, and at ’em and drive ’em to the Devil!”
+
+“I will, my lord, by God!” was Pakenham’s laconic reply, and he turned
+away to give the necessary orders.
+
+[Sidenote: A FURIOUS COUNTER-ATTACK]
+
+The two Eagles were taken in the course of Pakenham’s attack, when
+the Third Division, with the Fifth advancing on one flank, was moving
+forward to meet the fierce counter-attack with which the enemy, after
+the first collision, attempted to make amends for their commander’s
+blunder.
+
+“We were assailed,” describes a British officer in the Third Division,
+“by a multitude who, reinforced, again rallied and turned upon us
+with fury. The peals of musketry along the centre continued without
+intermission, the smoke was so thick that nothing to our left was
+distinguishable; some men of the Fifth Division got intermingled with
+ours; the dry grass was set on fire by the numerous cartridge-papers
+that strewed the battlefield; the air was scorching; and the smoke
+rolling onwards in huge volumes, nearly suffocated us.”
+
+In the midst of the din and turmoil the Heavy Cavalry came suddenly on
+the scene. “A loud cheering was heard in our rear; the Brigade half
+turned round, supposing themselves about to be attacked by the French
+cavalry. A few seconds passed, the trampling of horses was heard, the
+smoke cleared away, and the Heavy Brigade of Le Marchant was seen
+coming forward in line at a canter. ‘Open right and left!’ was an order
+quickly obeyed; the line opened, and the cavalry passed through the
+intervals, and, forming rapidly in our front, prepared for their work.”
+
+Catastrophe for the French assailants followed at once; swift,
+overwhelming, irremediable. The enemy in front had practically ceased
+to exist within the next twelve minutes. The entire French division
+and its supporting troops were struck down and shattered; broken to
+fragments and annihilated.
+
+There was a “whirling cloud of dust, moving swiftly forward and
+carrying within its womb the trampling sound of a charging multitude.
+As it passed the left of the Third Division, Le Marchant’s heavy
+horsemen, flanked by Anson’s Light Cavalry, broke out at full speed,
+and the next instant 1,200 French infantry, formed in several lines,
+were trampled down with terrible clangour and tumult. Bewildered and
+blinded they cast away their arms and ran through the openings of the
+British squadron, stooping and demanding quarter, while the dragoons,
+big men on big horses, rode on hard, smiting with their long,
+glittering swords in uncontrollable power, and the Third Division,
+following at speed, shouted as the French masses fell in succession
+before this dreadful charge.”
+
+So Napier describes the onset.
+
+[Sidenote: CHARGING DOWN AT FULL GALLOP]
+
+Startled and aghast at what they saw coming at them, the French
+attempted hastily to form squares. But Le Marchant’s impetuous
+squadrons were too quick for them. They came swooping down, the
+troopers galloping their hardest, with loosened reins, all racing
+forward, charging down with the irresistible sweep of an avalanche, and
+crashed into the midst of the ill-fated infantrymen before the squares
+could be formed.
+
+Down on the enemy the cavalry thundered, 1,200 flashing British
+sabres. Three of the finest regiments of the British Army formed the
+brigade--the 3rd Dragoons, the “King’s Own”; the 4th, “Queen’s Own”;
+the 5th Dragoon Guards--strong and burly men on big-boned horses,
+and with sharp-edged swords. “_Nec aspera terrent_” was--and is--the
+fearless motto of the gallant “King’s Own,” who showed the way; and
+they flinched at nothing that day. “_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_”
+was--and is--the motto of the 5th, who closed the column; and dead
+and wounded and prisoners were the vestiges they left in rear on that
+stricken field.
+
+General Edward Le Marchant, a daring and capable soldier--“a most
+noble officer,” was what Wellington called him--led them.
+
+[Sidenote: FOUR REGIMENTS CUT TO PIECES]
+
+A French regiment a little in advance, the ill-fated 62nd of the Line,
+was the first to face the British, and to go down. They did not attempt
+to form square. They had, indeed, no time to do so. Yet they were
+in a formation sufficiently formidable. The 62nd was a regiment of
+three battalions, and stood formed up in a column of half-battalions,
+presenting six successive lines closely massed one behind the other.
+Their front ranks opened fire just before the leading horsemen reached
+them, but it did not check the British onset even for a moment. The
+cavalry bore vigorously forward at a gallop and burst into and through
+their column, riding it down on the spot. Nearly the whole regiment was
+killed, wounded, or taken; leaving the broken remnants to be carried
+off as prisoners by the infantry of the Third Division as these raced
+up in rear, clearing the ground before them.
+
+The 62nd were disposed of by the cavalry in less than two minutes.
+According to French official returns, the unlucky regiment, out of
+a total strength that morning of 2,800 of all ranks in its three
+battalions, lost 20 officers and 1,100 men in killed alone; the
+survivors who escaped capture not being sufficient to form half a
+battalion.
+
+Cheering triumphantly, the charging squadrons dashed on. They came
+full tilt on a second French regiment, the 22nd, catching it in the
+act of forming square. The front face of the square was already drawn
+up and met the troopers with a hasty volley which brought down some of
+the men and horses. But that made little difference. The next moment
+the cavalry were on them. The mass of the square in rear made but a
+weak effort at resistance. They swayed back, broke their ranks, and
+fell apart in utter confusion. Slashed down right and left, as had
+been the case with the 62nd, in little more than a minute only groups
+of fugitives were left, to be made prisoners by the British infantry,
+following in rear of the horsemen.
+
+The cavalry raced on then to attack a third French regiment. In turn it
+attempted to make a stand, but only to be dealt with in like manner.
+It, too, was caught before its square could be formed, and was ridden
+down.
+
+Yet another French battalion confronted the British troopers after
+that. It had had time to take advantage of a small copse, an open wood
+of evergreen oaks, where it formed its ranks in _colonne serrée_, to
+await attack, and make a stand. “The men reserved their fire with much
+coolness, until the cavalry came within twenty yards. Then they poured
+it in on the concentrated mass of men and horses with deadly effect.
+Nearly a third of the dragoons came to the ground, but the remainder
+had sufficient command of their horses to dash forward. They succeeded
+in breaking the French ranks and dispersing them in utter confusion
+over the field.”
+
+All the time the infantry in rear were racing on with exultant cheers,
+finishing off the horsemen’s work as fast as they came up. It was
+an easy task. Further fight had been scared out of the French under
+the stress of the fearful experience they had gone through. “Such as
+got away from the sabres of the horsemen,” says one of the British
+officers, “sought safety amongst the ranks of our infantry; and,
+scrambling under their horses, ran to us for protection, like men who,
+having escaped the first shock of a wreck, will cling to any broken
+spar, no matter how little to be depended on. Hundreds of beings,
+frightfully disfigured, in whom the human face and form were almost
+obliterated--black with dust, worn down with fatigue, and covered with
+sabre-cuts and blood--threw themselves among us for safety. Not a man
+was bayoneted--not one even molested or plundered. The invincible old
+Third on this day surpassed themselves; for they not only defeated
+their terrible enemies in a fair stand-up fight, but saved them when
+total annihilation seemed the only thing.”
+
+The two Salamanca Eagles were taken now. They fell to two infantry
+officers as their actual captors: one to an officer of a regiment of
+the Third Division, and the other to an officer of the Fifth Division,
+which had come into the fight, and were following the cavalry, partly
+mingled with Pakenham’s men.
+
+[Sidenote: TAKEN IN HAND-TO-HAND FIGHT]
+
+The first Eagle--that of the hapless French 62nd, whose fate has been
+told--fell to Lieutenant Pierce of the 44th, a regiment in the Fifth
+Division. He came on the Eagle-bearer while in the act of unscrewing
+the Eagle from its pole in order to hide it under his long overcoat and
+get away with it. Pierce sprang on the Frenchman, and tussled with him
+for the Eagle. The second Porte-Aigle joined in the fight, whereupon
+three men of the 44th ran to their officer’s assistance. A third
+Frenchman, a private, added himself to the combatants, and was in the
+act of bayoneting the British lieutenant, when one of the men of the
+44th, Private Finlay, shot him through the head and saved the officer’s
+life. Both the Porte-Aigles were killed a moment later--one by
+Lieutenant Pierce, who snatched the Eagle from its dead bearer’s hands.
+In his excitement over the prize Pierce rewarded the privates who had
+helped him by emptying his pockets on the spot, and dividing what money
+he had on him amongst them--twenty dollars. A sergeant’s halberd was
+then procured, on which the Eagle was stuck and carried triumphantly
+through the remainder of the battle. Lieutenant Pierce presented it
+next morning to General Leith, the Commander of the Fifth Division, who
+directed him to carry it to Wellington. In honour of the exploit the
+44th, now the Essex Regiment, bear the badge of a Napoleonic Eagle on
+the regimental colour, and the officers wear a similar badge on their
+mess-jackets.
+
+The second Eagle taken was that of the 22nd of the Line. It was
+captured by a British officer of the 30th, Ensign Pratt, attached
+for duty to Major Cruikshank’s 7th Portuguese, a Light Infantry (or
+Caçadores) battalion, serving with the Third Division. He took it to
+General Pakenham, whose mounted orderly displayed the Eagle of the 22nd
+publicly after the battle, “carrying it about wherever the general went
+for the next two days.”
+
+Two more Eagles, it was widely reported in the Army, came into the
+possession of other regiments of the Third and Fifth Divisions. One of
+them is said to have “wanted its head and number”; but what became of
+them is unknown. Possibly the existence of these particular trophies
+was merely camp gossip. According to one story, an officer picked
+up one of the Eagles during the battle and “carried it about in his
+cap for some days.” No Eagles, however, reached head-quarters after
+Salamanca except those of the 62nd and 22nd, which in due course were
+sent to England.[27]
+
+[Sidenote: ONE THAT JUST ESCAPED]
+
+One Eagle narrowly evaded capture at the hands of the Hanoverian
+Dragoons of the King’s German Legion in the pursuit after Salamanca.
+It escaped--to find its way to Chelsea Hospital on a later day, as the
+famous trophy of our own 1st Dragoons, the “Royals,” at Waterloo. What
+took place when the Eagle of the 105th of the Line so nearly fell into
+the enemy’s hands after Salamanca is a story that in its incidents
+stands by itself.
+
+General Anson’s cavalry brigade, made up of British Light Dragoons
+and the Hanoverians, was sent in chase to follow and break up the
+wreck of the defeated army. It came upon the French rearguard in the
+act of taking post at a place called Garcia Hernandez. In front were
+several squadrons of cavalry; in rear the 105th of the Line. The three
+battalions of the regiment were moving in column, with guns in the
+intervals. Not seeing the French infantry and guns at first, owing
+to an intervening ridge, Anson rode for the cavalry and drove them
+in. “Their squadrons fled from Anson’s troopers, abandoning three
+battalions of infantry, who in separate columns were making up a hollow
+slope, hoping to gain the crest of some heights before the pursuing
+cavalry could fall on, and the two foremost did reach higher ground,
+and there formed in squares.” The squares at once opened fire on the
+horsemen, and for a moment checked them.
+
+[Sidenote: A SQUARE CHARGED AND BROKEN]
+
+The Hanoverian Dragoons were the nearest of the pursuers to the
+rearmost of the French squares, and there was no way to ride past
+without exposing their flank at close range. Captain Von Decken, who
+was leading the dragoons, on the spur of the moment took the daring
+decision to attack the square with the single squadron he had with him,
+then and there. Without an instant’s hesitation the gallant captain
+charged, regardless of the fierce fusillade that met him at once, from
+which his men went down all round. They dropped fast under fire. By
+twos, by threes, by tens, all round they fell; yet the rest of them,
+surmounting the difficulties of the ground, hurled themselves in a mass
+on the column and went clean through it.
+
+The gallant Von Decken was among the first to go down, shot dead a
+hundred yards from the square. But a leader no less heroic was at
+hand. Instantly Captain Von Uslar Gleichen, in charge of the left
+troop, dashed to the front. He rode out to the head of the squadron,
+inciting his men by voice and gesture and example. Another French
+volley smote hard on the squadron, but the intrepid troopers galloped
+through it, and, bringing up their right flank, swept on towards the
+enemy’s bayonets, making to attack the square on two sides. The two
+foremost ranks of the French were on the knee with bayonets to the
+front, presenting a deadly double row of steel. In rear the steady
+muskets of four standing ranks were levelled at the horsemen. The
+dragoons pressed on close up, and some were trying, in vain, to beat
+aside the bayonets before them, and make a gap through, when an
+accident at the critical moment gave the opportunity. A shot from the
+kneeling ranks, apparently fired unintentionally, as it is said, killed
+a horse, and caused it with its rider to fall forward, right across
+and on top of the bayonets. Thus a lane was unexpectedly laid open to
+the cavalry. They seized the chance instantly and crowded in through.
+The square was broken. It was cleft apart: its ranks were scattered
+and dispersed. All was over in a few moments. Within three minutes the
+entire battalion had been either cut down under the slaughtering swords
+of the dragoons or had been made prisoners.
+
+Immediately on that another Hanoverian captain, Von Reitzenstein, came
+sweeping by with the second squadron, riding for the second French
+square. These met the charge with a bold front and rapid volley, but
+their _moral_ had been shaken by the startling and horrible scene
+they had just beheld. The front face of the second square gave way as
+the horsemen got close, and four-fifths of that battalion were either
+sabred on the spot or made prisoners.
+
+There was yet, near by, the third battalion in its square. Its numbers
+had been added to by such fugitive survivors from the first and second
+squares as had been able to reach the place and get inside. The third
+squadron of the Dragoons dealt with the third square in the same way,
+riding boldly at it, and breaking in with deadly results, as before.
+
+How the Eagle of the 105th was saved--it was with the first battalion
+in the square first broken--is not on record. It did, however, somehow,
+evade capture--hidden hastily perhaps beneath the coat of somebody
+in the handful of men who got away in the _mêlée_. Only the broken
+Eagle-pole was left, to be picked up among the dead after the fight:
+
+Described a British officer who went over the ground after the fight:
+
+“The contest ended in a dreadful massacre of the French infantry. The
+105th bravely stood their ground, but the ponderous weight of the heavy
+cavalry broke down all resistance; and arms lopped off, heads cloven
+to the spine, or gashes across the breast and shoulders showed the
+fearful encounter that had taken place.”
+
+[Sidenote: SPOILS TAKEN IN ANOTHER WAY]
+
+The third of the trophy Eagles paraded in London before the Prince
+Regent was that of Napoleon’s 39th of the Line. It had been picked up
+in the dried-up bed of the river Ceira, one of the tributaries of the
+Douro. Apparently the Eagle had been dropped, owing to the fall of its
+bearer during the night action of Foz d’Aronce on June 15, 1811, when
+Ney’s corps of Masséna’s army, then retreating from Torres Vedras, was
+roughly handled and driven across the river by Wellington’s Third and
+Light Divisions.
+
+The fourth and fifth of the Eagles were found at Madrid on Wellington’s
+occupation of the city after Salamanca--stored away in the French
+arsenal and army dépôt there, to which uses the ancient Royal
+Palace of the Buen Retiro, just outside the walls of Madrid, had
+been converted.[28] Seventeen hundred men held the Retiro, and the
+approaches to the arsenal had been fortified by order of Napoleon, but
+the garrison surrendered without firing a shot. They gave up to the
+victors 180 brass cannon, 900 barrels of powder, 20,000 stand of arms,
+muskets and bayonets, together with the Eagles of the 13th and 51st of
+the Line, which had been laid up at the Retiro for safe custody while
+the two regiments were operating in a wild part of the country against
+the Spanish guerrillas.[29]
+
+The last Eagles taken by Wellington in the Peninsular War came into our
+hands in the battles of the Pyrenees.[30] Neither of them is now in
+existence. One was taken by our 28th in the combat of the Pass of Maya.
+The 28th, supporting the 92nd Highlanders in the fighting, overwhelmed
+with a series of fierce volleys an unfortunate French regiment, which
+was afterwards discovered to be the French 28th--a curious coincidence.
+The Eagle of the 28th, the senior corps of its brigade, was found on
+the battlefield, and was brought to England and hung in the Chapel
+Royal, Whitehall. It disappeared from there in circumstances already
+related. The second French Eagle was that of the 52nd of the Line,
+presented by Wellington, as has been told, to the Spanish Cortes. That
+also has since been entirely lost sight of.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S ORDER OF RECALL]
+
+This also may be added. Early in 1813 a special order was issued by
+Napoleon to the army in Spain requiring the Eagles of most of the
+regiments to be sent back to France. Napoleon at that time was in
+Paris, engaged in getting together a new Grand Army to replace that
+destroyed in Russia. The regiments in Spain, he said, would be so
+weakened by the intended withdrawal of their third, fourth, and fifth
+battalions (which he was recalling in order to send them to Germany for
+the coming campaign there), that the Eagles--in charge of the first
+battalions which were remaining in Spain--would be exposed to undue
+risk. “In future,” he wrote, “there will in Spain be only one Eagle to
+each brigade, that of the senior regiment of the brigade.” The Eagles
+withdrawn from Spain, added the order, would “in the end rejoin the
+battalions with the Grand Army in Germany, as soon as these had been
+reconstituted afresh as regiments, with a sufficient force of men to
+ensure the safety of the Eagles.” All the cavalry Eagles were recalled:
+“No regiment of Cavalry in Spain is to retain its Eagle. Those who have
+not done so are immediately to send theirs to the dépôt.”
+
+It was due to this order mainly that at Vittoria, after the
+overwhelming rout of the French army, only one Eagle-pole--with its
+Eagle gone--fell into British hands, although there had been on the
+field upwards of 70,000 French soldiers (of whom 55,000 were infantry),
+and the French lost everything--in the words of one of their own
+generals (Gazan), “all their equipages, all their guns, all their
+treasure, all their stores, all their papers.”[31]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+IN THE HOUR OF DARKEST DISASTER
+
+
+AFTER MOSCOW: HOW THE EAGLES FACED THEIR FATE
+
+There are seventy-five standards of Napoleon’s Grand Army of 1812 now
+in Russia, trophies of the Moscow disaster. Rather more than half of
+the number are Eagles. The remainder of the trophies are battalion and
+cavalry flags; some French, some the ensigns of allied contingents and
+the troops of vassal states of the Napoleonic Empire, compelled to
+take a part in the campaign. All the European armies of the period are
+represented among the trophies: green and white Saxon flags; blue and
+white Bavarian flags; violet and white Polish ensigns; Spanish, Dutch,
+and Portuguese colours; Swiss flags; Westphalian and Baden flags of the
+Confederation of the Rhine; the red and black of Würtemburg; the yellow
+and black of Austria; the white and black of Prussia; the green, white,
+and red tricolor of Italy.
+
+They are preserved at St. Petersburg, in the Kazan Cathedral and in the
+Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Those in the Kazan Cathedral are
+grouped over and round the tomb of the septuagenarian hero, Kutusoff,
+who lies buried on the spot where he knelt in prayer before setting
+out to take command as generalissimo of the national army. Near by,
+suspended against the pillars, are the marshal’s bâton of Davout, and
+the keys of Hamburg, Leipsic, Dresden, Rheims, Breda, and Utrecht,
+similarly spoils of the Napoleonic war.[32]
+
+[Sidenote: MOST OF THE EAGLES GOT THROUGH]
+
+The actual Eagle trophies number all told between forty and fifty: less
+than a third of the total array of Eagles that crossed the Niemen at
+the head of their regiments on the outbreak of the war. The majority
+of the Eagles of the Grand Army were saved from falling into the hands
+of the Russians through the devoted heroism of those responsible for
+their safe-keeping amid the horrors of the retreat. Of those at St.
+Petersburg, not more than half at most were taken in actual combat,
+and they were only yielded up by their bearers with life, being
+picked up from among the dead bodies, and carried off by the Russians
+on going over the field after the fight was over. Five Eagles only
+were surrendered by capitulation. The others were brought in by the
+Cossacks, who came upon them while prowling in rear of the retreating
+army. They were found, some in hollow trees, where their despairing
+bearers had tried to conceal them; some in holes dug with bayonets in
+the frozen ground underneath the snow. Others were dragged to light,
+broken from their staves, from beneath the coats or from the knapsacks
+of officers and men, who had fallen by the way at night and been
+frozen to death, during the final stage of the retreat between Wilna
+and the Niemen. It is in remembrance of how, to the last, during the
+Moscow retreat, in many a dark and hopeless hour, there yet remained
+detachments of devoted men, the last remnants of regiments, at all
+times ready to stand at bay and sacrifice themselves for the honour of
+their Eagles, amidst hordes of disorganised fugitives all round--in
+remembrance of that, the army of modern France commemorates on the
+colours of certain regiments, as representing corps that bore the same
+numbers in Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia, the names, among others, of
+“Marojaroslav,” “Polotz,” “Wiasma,” “Krasnoi,” “La Berezène,” defeats
+and disasters though these were.
+
+[Sidenote: WHAT FRANCE REMEMBERS TO-DAY]
+
+The Eagles were under fire for the first time in Russia on July 17,
+in the attack on Smolensk on the Dnieper, the ancient Lithuanian
+capital, where took place the first important battle of the war. There
+the Eagles of Ney’s and Davout’s corps did their part in inciting
+the men to add fresh laurels to the fame of their regiments; ever
+prominent in the attack, leading charge after charge as the columns
+made repeated efforts to storm the fortified suburbs and lofty ramparts
+of the citadel. The soldiers did all that intrepidity and desperate
+valour might attempt, but in vain. No valour could prevail against
+the stubborn endurance of the Russians, who also occupied a strongly
+walled position that was practically impregnable. The fierce contest
+went on all through a whole day, until nightfall, and then, under cover
+of darkness, the defenders silently drew off and retreated beyond the
+city, leaving Smolensk in flames. No fewer than 15,000 French and
+10,000 Russians fell in the merciless encounter.
+
+Next morning there followed a spectacle hardly ever perhaps paralleled:
+the march of the Grand Army through the streets between the still
+blazing houses, “the martial columns advancing in the finest order to
+the sound of military music.” “We traversed between furnaces,” as an
+officer puts it, “tramping over the hot and smouldering ashes, in all
+the pomp of military splendour, bands playing and each Eagle leading
+its men.”
+
+[Sidenote: WON ON THE BATTLEFIELD]
+
+At Smolensk one regiment won its Eagle, which Napoleon presented at
+five o’clock in the morning on July 19, before the paraded battalions
+of Davout’s corps. It was the 127th of the Line; a regiment, it is
+curious to note, enrolled a few months before, from former Hanoverian
+subjects of our own King George the Third, and commanded by French
+officers as a regular corps of the French Line. By Napoleon’s latest
+ordinance, issued just before the Emperor quitted Paris in May,
+the regiments newly raised for the Russian War, of which there were
+several, were in each case to win their Eagles on the battlefield. The
+Eagle for each regiment was to be provided in advance, but would be
+held back, locked up in the regimental chest, until it “should be won
+by distinguished conduct.” The 127th won their Eagle at Smolensk, their
+brilliant service being specially brought before Napoleon by Marshal
+Davout, who, of his own initiative, claimed the Eagle for them from
+Napoleon. The regiment bore it with distinction through the hottest of
+the fighting at Borodino, carried it all through the disastrous retreat
+from Moscow, and preserved it to the end to go through the later
+campaign in Germany, and face the enemy after that in the last stand
+before Paris in 1814. The Eagle was eventually destroyed by order of
+the restored Bourbon Government.
+
+The second great battle-day of the Eagles in the Russian War was
+at Borodino, on September 7. There a quarter of a million and more
+combatants faced each other: on one side, 132,000 Russians with 640
+guns; on the other, 133,000 French with 590 guns. The battle of
+Borodino was perhaps the most sanguinary and the most obstinately
+contested in history. The opening shots were fired at sunrise. When at
+sunset both sides drew sullenly apart, exhausted after twelve hours of
+carnage, neither army was victorious. Each held the ground on which it
+had begun the battle; 25,000 men lay dead on the field, and 68,000 more
+lay wounded, an appalling massacre that staggered even Napoleon.
+
+Amidst the ferocious savagery of the hand-to-hand fighting that
+characterised Borodino all over the field, many of the Eagles were
+in desperate peril. Several were cut off in the terrible havoc that
+the ferocious Russian counter-charges wrought in the French ranks,
+and were only saved by the stern fortitude of the soldiers, fighting
+at times back to back round the Eagles, keeping off the enemy with
+bayonet thrusts till help should come. In one part of the field the
+9th of the Line was isolated and for a time broken up and scattered.
+The Eagle-bearer was cut off by himself and surrounded. He saved the
+Eagle, as he fell wounded. “Amidst the confusion, wounded by two
+bayonet thrusts, I fell, but I was able to make an effort to prevent
+the Eagle falling into the hands of the enemy. Some of them rushed at
+me and closed round, but, getting to my feet, I managed to fling the
+Eagle, staff and all, over their heads towards some of our men, whom I
+had caught sight of, fortunately near by, trying to charge through and
+rescue the Eagle. This was all I could do before I fell again and was
+made prisoner.” The brave fellow returned to France two years later,
+at the Peace of 1814, and made his way to the regimental dépôt, where
+he found barely twenty of his comrades at Borodino left. The rest had
+succumbed during the retreat from Moscow. The survivors had brought
+back the Eagle to France; only, however, to have to give it up to the
+new Minister of War for destruction.
+
+[Sidenote: TWO EAGLES JUST SAVED]
+
+The 18th of the Line, broken in a Russian counter-attack, after
+storming one of the Russian redoubts erected to defend part of the
+position, rallied with their Eagle in their midst and held their ground
+in spite of repeated attacks until help could get through to them. At
+the roll-call next morning, 40 officers out of 50, and 800 men out of
+2,000 were reported as missing; left dead or wounded on the field.
+Another regiment lost its colonel and half one battalion dead on the
+field; the Eagle-Guard were all shot down or bayoneted round the Eagle,
+which in the end was saved and brought out of the battle by a corporal,
+who was awarded a commission by Napoleon in the presence of the remains
+of the regiment next day. The Eagle of the 61st of the Line again
+was only kept out of Russian hands by the devotion of the men round
+it. Napoleon rode past the regiment next day while being paraded for
+the roll to be called. Only two battalions were there, and he asked
+the colonel where the third battalion was. “It is in the redoubt,
+Sire!” was the officer’s reply, pointing in the direction of the Great
+Redoubt, round which some of the hardest fighting of the day had taken
+place. The battalion had literally been annihilated: not an officer or
+a man of the 1,100 in the third battalion of the 61st had returned from
+the fight.
+
+A regiment of Cuirassiers lost its Eagle at Borodino: the Eagle had
+disappeared in the midst of a fierce _mêlée_, in which the Eagle-bearer
+had gone down. The loss was not discovered till later. All, however,
+refused to believe that it had been captured: that was incredible.
+The dead Eagle-bearer’s body was found after the battle, but no Eagle
+was there. Overwhelmed with shame, the regiment had to admit that the
+impossible had happened, and during the weeks that they were at Moscow
+“they remained plunged in a profound dolour.” The Eagle reappeared in
+an extraordinary way. In the retreat, when passing the scene of the
+battle, a ghastly and horrible spectacle with its unburied corpses
+and the carcasses of horses strewn thickly and heaped up all over the
+field, a sudden thought struck one of the officers. Late that night,
+he and a brother officer, taking the risk of capture by Cossacks on
+the prowl in rear of the retreating army, rode back and found their
+way by moonlight to where the Cuirassiers had had their fight and the
+Eagle-bearer had fallen. They found the Eagle inside the carcass of
+the Eagle-bearer’s horse. It had been thrust in there by the dying
+Eagle-bearer through the gaping wound that had killed the horse, as the
+only means to conceal it in the midst of the enemy.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW THE EAGLES ENTERED MOSCOW]
+
+The Eagles made their last triumphant entry into a conquered capital
+at Moscow on September 14, the Eagle of the Old Guard leading the
+way at the head of the grenadiers of the Guard, all wearing for the
+day their full-dress parade uniform. As has been said, every officer
+and soldier of the Guard, by Napoleon’s standing order, carried a
+suit of full-dress uniform in his kit or knapsack on campaign in
+readiness for such occasions--“en tenue de parade comme si elle eut
+défiler au Carrousel.” They had marched like that with music and
+full military pomp twice through Vienna, and through the streets of
+Berlin and Madrid; but there was at Moscow a disconcerting and ominous
+difference, both in their surroundings and in the reception that they
+met. Elsewhere, alike in Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, the parade march
+of the victorious Eagles passed through densely crowded streets of
+onlookers, silently gazing with dejected mien at the scene. At Moscow
+not a soul was in the streets, at the windows, anywhere; on every side
+were emptiness and desolation. The inhabitants had fled the city, and
+only deserted houses remained. The first incendiary fires at Moscow
+broke out at midnight, within twelve hours of Napoleon taking up his
+residence in the Kremlin.
+
+The spell after that was broken. Henceforward victory deserted the
+Eagles; the hour of fate was at hand for Napoleon and the Grand Army.
+The Fortune of War, indeed, turned against the Eagles even before
+Napoleon had quitted Moscow.
+
+Early on October 18, Napoleon, while at breakfast in the Kremlin,
+suddenly heard distant cannonading away to the south. He learned
+what had happened that afternoon while holding a review of the
+Italian Royal Guard. “We hastily regained our quarters, packed up our
+parade-uniforms, put on our service kit ... and to the sound of our
+drums and bands threaded our way through the streets of Moscow at five
+in the afternoon.” During the past five weeks, while all had been
+outwardly quiet, the Russian armies had been manœvring to close in
+along the only road of retreat open to Napoleon.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FIRST SENT TO THE CZAR]
+
+The nearest of the Russian armies, concentrated to the south-west of
+Moscow, struck the first blow on October 18 at daybreak, by surprising
+Murat’s cavalry camp near Vinkovo. The results to the French were
+disastrous. Two thousand of Murat’s men were killed and as many
+more were taken prisoners. Between thirty and forty guns were lost,
+and Murat’s personal camp-baggage train, which included “his silver
+canteens and cooking utensils, in which cats’ and horse flesh were
+found prepared for food”--a discovery that opened the eyes of the
+Russians to the precarious position of affairs in Napoleon’s army.
+Murat himself, according to one story, “rode off on the first alarm in
+his shirt.” He only got away, according to another, by cutting his way
+through the Russians sword in hand, at the head of his personal escort
+of carabineers. Two Eagles were spoils of the surprise; the first to
+fall into Russian hands in the war. They were lost in the general
+scrimmage, their bearers being sabred at the outset of the Russian
+onslaught. The Eagles were at once sent off to St. Petersburg to be
+presented to the Czar Alexander.
+
+On the other hand nine Eagles were saved, their escorts fighting their
+way successfully through the Russians.
+
+Many stories are recorded in memoirs of survivors of the Grand Army of
+heroic endeavours made repeatedly by officers and men to save their
+Eagles from the enemy amid the disasters and horrors of the retreat.
+Their devotion and self-sacrifice had their reward in the preservation
+of seven Eagles in every ten.
+
+Two Eagles were lost fourteen days after leaving Moscow, in the
+disastrous battle at Wiasma on November 2, halfway on the road back to
+Smolensk, where the advanced columns of the pursuing Russians attacked
+and all but cut the retreating French army in two. The rearguard of
+the Grand Army, Marshal Davout’s corps, with the Italian corps of the
+Viceroy Eugène Beauharnais, was overpowered and driven in and broken
+up; crushed under the overpowering artillery fire of the Russians. They
+left behind 6,000 dead, 2,000 prisoners, and 27 guns. Two Eagles were
+taken, their regiments being virtually annihilated, but twenty-one
+were saved. They were safeguarded through the rout by groups of
+brave-hearted officers and men, who beat off the rushes made at them
+by the Russian cavalry and the Cossacks. They fought their way through
+until they met Ney’s troops, who had heard the firing and turned back,
+arriving in time to stem and check the Russian pursuit and enable
+what was left of the two shattered army corps to rally under their
+protection.
+
+[Sidenote: “WE HAVE DONE OUR DUTY!”]
+
+One infantry regiment at Wiasma perished on the battlefield to a man,
+but saved its Eagle. It was the rearmost of all, and was isolated and
+surrounded beyond reach of help. In vain its men formed square and
+tried to fight their way after the rest through the surging masses of
+the Russians. They made their way for a time until the enemy brought
+up artillery. A Russian battery galloped up, unlimbered close to them,
+and opened fire with murderous effect. The Frenchmen tried desperately
+to charge the guns, but were beaten back by a rush of cavalry. At last,
+in despair, they formed square and faced the cruel slaughter that the
+guns made in their ranks, in the hope that help might reach them. Terms
+were offered them and refused. They would not surrender, and fought on
+till dusk, when their ammunition gave out. The Russians were closing
+round for a final decisive charge on the small handful of survivors,
+when the wounded colonel, seeing all was over, made the attempt that
+saved the Eagle. The scanty remnant of what had that morning been a
+regiment of 3,000 men formed round in a ring, facing towards the enemy
+with bayonets levelled. The Eagle-staff was broken up and the fragments
+thrust under the ground. With flint and steel a match was lighted and
+the silken tricolor consumed. The Eagle was then tied up in a havresac
+and entrusted to an old soldier who was known to be a good rider. The
+colonel, giving up his own charger to the man, bade him watch his
+chance and, as the enemy came on in the dark, dash through them and
+ride his hardest. “Carry the Eagle to his Majesty,” were the colonel’s
+words. “Deliver it to him, and tell him that we have done our duty!”
+The man rode off. He was able to get through the nearest Russians under
+cover of the darkness, having to fight his way before he got clear, and
+receiving several wounds. Then his horse fell dead from its injuries.
+On foot he stumbled on, and before midnight reached, not Napoleon, but
+Marshal Ney, to whom he gave up his precious charge. No officer or man
+of the others of the luckless regiment was ever heard of in France
+again. No prisoners from it ever returned--only the Eagle survived.
+
+Three days after Wiasma the Russian winter suddenly set in on the
+doomed host. It brought about at once the disintegration and
+disorganisation of the Grand Army. Already, demoralised by their
+privation, hundreds of men had fallen out of the ranks, flinging away
+their muskets and knapsacks, and straggling along in disorderly groups.
+A third practically of the Army ceased to exist as a fighting force
+within the first fortnight of the retreat, before the first snows fell.
+The others, though, still kept to their duty. Marching in the ranks day
+after day, they strove their hardest to beat back the incessant attacks
+of the swarms of Cossacks, hovering round on the watch to raid the
+baggage-convoys at every block or stoppage on the road. With the coming
+of the snow the doom of the Grand Army was sealed. It was impossible to
+maintain discipline with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero.
+Men dropped dead from cold by the score every half-mile.
+
+On November 6 the sun disappeared; a grey fog enshrouded everything;
+the frost set in; and a bitter north wind in howling gusts swept over
+the face of the land; with it came down the snow, falling hour after
+hour by day and night without ceasing.
+
+“From that day the Army lost its courage and its military instinct. The
+soldier no longer obeyed his officer. The officer separated himself
+from his general. The disbanded regiments marched in disorder. In
+their frantic search for food they spread themselves over the plain,
+pillaging and destroying whatever fell in their way.” So a survivor
+wrote.
+
+The snow came down “in large broad flakes, which at once chilled and
+blinded the soldiers: the marchers, however, stumbled forward, men
+often struggling and at last sinking in holes and ravines that were
+concealed from them by the new and disguised appearance of the country.
+Those who yet retained discipline and kept their ranks stood some
+chance of receiving assistance; but amid the mass of stragglers, the
+men’s hearts, intent only on self-preservation, became hardened and
+closed against every feeling of sympathy and compassion. The storm-wind
+lifted the snow from the earth, as well as that steadily pelting down
+from above, into dizzy eddies round the soldiers. Many were hurled to
+the ground in this manner, while the same snow furnished them with an
+instant grave, under which they were concealed until the next summer
+came, to display their ghastly remains in the open air.”
+
+[Sidenote: WHEN THE COSSACKS GOT TO WORK]
+
+The Cossacks redoubled their attacks on the retreating army after
+Wiasma. They had harassed the French incessantly from the day after
+Napoleon passed Mojaisk, but after Wiasma their audacity increased a
+hundredfold. They captured prisoners hourly, from among the stragglers
+mostly; in droves, by fifties and hundreds at a time. Day after day
+they hung on the flanks, swooping down with loud shouts on the
+unfortunate wretches, rounding them up like sheep, and driving them
+before them towards their own camps at the points of their long lances.
+Many they killed on the spot, or stripped naked to perish in the snow.
+Others they drove along to the nearest camp of Kutusoff’s regulars for
+the sake of the money reward offered for prisoners brought in alive.
+Others again, to save themselves the trouble of driving them all the
+way to the army camp, they handed over to peasants in the villages,
+selling them at a rouble a head, for the peasants to make sport of
+and maltreat or kill. The brutalities and ruthless devastations that
+the French army had committed in its advance to Moscow had infuriated
+the Russian peasantry. Intent on vengeance they now made use of their
+opportunity to the full. They burned alive some of their captives, by
+tossing them into pits half filled with blazing pine-logs. Seventy
+were done to death in this horrible way in one village. Others they
+buried up to their necks in the ground and left to die; or else tied
+them to trees for the wolves to tear to pieces.[33] Others they clubbed
+or flogged to death, tying down the wretched Frenchmen to logs on
+the ground, hounding on the women and children to hammer their heads
+to pieces with thick sticks. A common method of Cossacks and peasants
+alike for making prisoners was to light great watch-fires at night,
+a little way off from the retreating column, and as the frozen and
+starving stragglers came crowding up to the blaze they surrounded them
+and carried them off wholesale.
+
+After the snow set in, guns and baggage-wagons were abandoned to the
+Cossacks at almost every hundred yards. It was impossible for the
+weakened and dying horses to drag them along; even to keep their
+footing on the frozen ground. Within the first week after Wiasma the
+appalling number of 30,000 horses either died of starvation, there
+being no way of getting fodder for them because of the snow, or were
+frozen to death.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES OF NEY’S CORPS]
+
+In spite of everything, some of the regiments still kept together and
+marched in military formation, with their Eagles at their head; those
+in particular of Marshal Ney’s corps. They formed the rearguard and
+chief protection to the army from Wiasma onwards; held together by the
+heroic example and personality of their indefatigable leader, ever
+present where there was fighting, ever calm and confident, and ready
+with words of encouragement. Not an Eagle was lost along the line of
+march between Moscow and Smolensk by Ney’s men; rallying round them to
+beat off the Cossack attacks time and again with the cry, “Aux Aigles!
+Voici les Cosaques!”
+
+This incident, not unlike the cuirassier ride to recover the Eagle left
+on the field at Borodino, is said to have taken place between Wiasma
+and Smolensk. One regiment of Ney’s cavalry missed its Eagle after a
+sharp fight on the road, the Eagle-bearer having apparently fallen
+during the encounter, unseen by the survivors. That night round the
+bivouac fire lots were drawn, and two officers rode back amid blinding
+snow squalls to try to find the Eagle. They successfully evaded the
+Cossacks and made their way ten miles back to the scene of the combat,
+where, after scaring off some wolves, they searched in the snow and
+found the dead officer’s body with the Eagle by its side. They brought
+it back safely to the regiment and restored it to their comrades. Their
+limbs were frost-bitten and rigid from cold, so that they had to be
+lifted off their horses, but the brave men were content--they had saved
+their Eagle.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+    _Photo Alinari._
+
+MARSHAL NEY WITH THE REARGUARD IN THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.
+
+From a picture by A. Ivon, at Versailles.]
+
+[Sidenote: SO FAR TEN EAGLES LOST]
+
+At Krasnoi, on November 19, between Smolensk and the Beresina, Napoleon
+underwent another severe defeat from the pursuing Russians, 10,000
+prisoners and 70 guns falling into the victors’ hands. Two Eagles were
+carried off from the battlefield and despatched to St. Petersburg
+by special courier, together with Kutusoff’s report to the Czar.
+Twenty-seven Eagles, however, got past the Russians, fighting their
+way through, thanks to the endurance of brave men who rallied round
+them. Krasnoi it was that gave the death-blow to Napoleon’s last hope
+of rallying the Grand Army. After it less than 30,000 men remained
+under arms with the main column, including the 8,000 survivors of the
+Imperial Guard. Up to then, according to the Russian official returns,
+80,000 prisoners, 500 guns, and “40 standards and flags of all kinds”
+had fallen into the hands of the pursuers. Not more than ten, however,
+of the forty standards taken were Eagles: the two taken at Murat’s
+surprise at Vinkovo; the two taken at Wiasma; the two taken at Krasnoi;
+also two taken before Napoleon reached Smolensk, from a brigade sent
+from Smolensk to help him on the road, which blundered into the middle
+of the Russian army and had to surrender; and two captured elsewhere,
+from the French flanking armies of Marshal Macdonald and Marshal St.
+Cyr. An eleventh Eagle was taken in the second battle at Krasnoi,
+from Ney’s rearguard; the only Eagle that Ney actually lost in fight
+throughout the 600 miles’ march between Moscow and the frontier.
+
+At Krasnoi, Ney’s rearguard, following at a day’s march behind the
+rest of the army, found its way barred. The Russians, after defeating
+Napoleon’s main column, a day’s march in advance, had waited on the
+scene of the former fighting for Ney. They held a position that it was
+practically impossible for Ney’s comparatively small force to get past.
+After vainly attempting to break through, Ney had to draw back, and
+make a forlorn-hope effort to avoid destruction by a long détour, in
+the course of which he had to abandon guns, baggage, and horses, and
+cross the Dnieper on ice hardly thick enough to bear the weight of a
+man.
+
+On the eve of Krasnoi, indeed, the rearguard found itself in so
+desperate a position, that Ney ordered all its Eagles to be destroyed.
+His regiments had suffered so severely in their continuous fighting,
+that it was impossible adequately to safeguard the Eagles. Every
+musket and bayonet was wanted in the fighting line. It was impossible
+to supply sufficient Eagle-escorts. So far, in spite of the dreadful
+straits to which some of the regiments had been reduced, all had
+marched openly with their Eagles, and fought round them, guarding them
+sedulously by night and day. “When excess of fatigue constrained us to
+take a few moments of repose,” describes Colonel De Fesenzac of the 4th
+of the Line, “we (what was left of the regiment able to carry arms--not
+100 men) assembled together in any place where we could find shelter,
+a few of the men standing by to mount guard for the protection of the
+regimental Eagle.”
+
+“Then,” describes the colonel, “came the order that all the Eagles
+should be broken up and buried. As I could not make up my mind to
+this, I directed that the staff should be burned, and that the Eagle
+of the 4th Regiment should be stowed in the knapsack of one of the
+Eagle-bearers, by whose side I kept my post on the march.” The Eagle
+of the 4th, it may be added by the way, was the identical Eagle that
+Napoleon had presented to the regiment in place of that lost at
+Austerlitz, in exchange for, as has been told, two captured Austrian
+flags.
+
+[Sidenote: “THEY OUGHT TO PERISH WITH US”]
+
+Other officers did the same as Colonel De Fesenzac. One officer,
+however, the colonel of the 18th of the Line, flatly refused to have
+his regimental Eagle either broken up or hidden away. “The Eagle,” he
+says in his journal, which still exists, “had throughout, until then,
+been carried at the head of the regiment, and I declined to obey the
+order on behalf of the 18th. It seemed to us a monstrous ignominy. Our
+Eagles were not given us to be made away with or hidden: they ought to
+perish with us.” The Eagle of the 18th did actually perish with the
+regiment. In the rearguard repulse at Krasnoi the entire regiment was
+destroyed, except for some twenty survivors, including the colonel,
+severely wounded. “Our Eagle,” says the gallant colonel, proudly
+recording its fate, “remained among our dead on the field of battle.”
+
+That Eagle of the 18th was the only one of Marshal Ney’s Eagles to
+fall into the hands of the Russians in battle. Some ten of the Eagles
+now at St. Petersburg were found on the bodies of officers and men who
+had been either frozen to death or had fallen dead on the march during
+Ney’s retreat after Krasnoi; they were not taken in fight.
+
+Ney rejoined Napoleon with only 1,500 men left out of 12,000, of which
+the rearguard had consisted when it left Smolensk. It was while making
+his last effort to get past the Russians after his attempt to break
+through at Krasnoi had failed, that Ney, overtaken on the banks of
+the half-frozen Dnieper on the evening before he risked his perilous
+crossing, and summoned by the Russians to surrender, made that proudly
+defiant reply which has ever since been a treasured memory to the
+French Army: “A Marshal of France never surrenders!” Six hours later
+he had evaded capture and, with the remnant of his corps, was across
+the river. All the world has heard how Napoleon, hopeless of seeing him
+again, welcomed Ney with the words: “I have three hundred millions of
+francs in the vaults of the Tuileries; I would have given them all for
+Marshal Ney!”
+
+[Sidenote: ALL KEPT TOGETHER FOR SAFETY]
+
+The remaining Eagles had by now been assembled for preservation under
+the protection of what troops of the main column, which Napoleon
+accompanied, still continued under arms. Further effort to rally the
+shattered host was beyond possibility. Only portions of the two army
+corps of Marshals Victor and Oudinot, called in from holding the line
+of communications, still retained military formation, together with
+the reduced battalions of the Old Guard which had kept near Napoleon
+throughout. To save the remaining Eagles, the officers of broken-up and
+disbanded regiments, with some devoted soldiers who stood by them, took
+personal charge of the Eagles, and carried them with their own hands.
+Banding together and marching in company side by side, they tramped on,
+plodding through the snow day and night for 200 miles; the collected
+Eagles all massed in the centre. They attached themselves to the column
+of the Old Guard, and kept their way close by Napoleon.
+
+A survivor of the retreat from Moscow, in his memoirs, describes how he
+saw Napoleon and the Eagles pass by him on the way to the Beresina on
+the morning of November 25:
+
+“Those in advance seemed to be generals, a few on horseback, but the
+greater part on foot. There was also a great number of other officers,
+the remnant of the Doomed Squadron and Battalion, formed on the 22nd
+and barely existing at the end of three days. Those on foot dragged
+themselves painfully along, almost all of them having their feet frozen
+and wrapped in rags or in bits of sheep’s-skin, and all nearly dying of
+hunger. Afterwards came the small remains of the Cavalry of the Guard.
+The Emperor came next, on foot, and carrying a staff. He wore a large
+cloak lined with fur, and had a red velvet cap with black-fox fur on
+his head. Murat walked on foot at his right, and on his left the Prince
+Eugène, Viceroy of Italy. Next came the Marshals Berthier--Prince of
+Neufchatel--Ney, Mortier, Lefebvre, with other marshals and generals
+whose corps had been annihilated.
+
+“The Emperor mounted a horse as soon as he had passed; so did a few of
+those with him: the greater part of them had no horses to ride. Seven
+or eight hundred officers and non-commissioned officers followed,
+walking in order and perfect silence, and carrying the Eagles of their
+different regiments, which had so often led them to victory. This was
+all that remained of 60,000 men.
+
+“After them came the Imperial Guard on foot, marching also in order.”
+
+Four Eagles were lost in the fighting at the passage of the
+Beresina, where a whole division of Marshal Victor’s corps (General
+Partonneaux’s) was cut off and compelled to surrender. On the last
+night, when either massacre under the Russian guns or laying down their
+arms was all that was left to them, they broke up and buried their
+Eagles in the ground underneath the snow. The officers of one regiment,
+it is told, broke up their Eagle before burying it, burned the flag
+at their last bivouac fire, mixed the ashes with thawed snow, and
+swallowed the concoction.
+
+[Illustration: NAPOLEON AND THE “SACRED SQUADRON” ON THE WAY TO THE
+BERESINA.
+
+From the picture by H. Bellangé.]
+
+[Sidenote: WHEN THE LAST HOPE WAS GONE]
+
+The little column of officers with their Eagles passed the Beresina
+with the Guard, and thus escaped that last catastrophe, the crowning
+horror of the bridge disaster, when 24,000 ill-fated human beings were
+sent to their account; either killed in the fighting with the Russians,
+or drowned in the river, jammed together on the burning bridge, while
+the Russian guns from the rear thundered on them with shot and shell.
+
+The officer-escort with the Eagles tramped on until Wilna was reached;
+until after Napoleon had left the army and set off for Paris. Then,
+on the final falling apart of the remnants of the stricken host,
+the officers themselves dispersed, to escape as best they could
+individually and get to the Niemen; breaking up the Eagle-poles and
+concealing the Eagles and flags in knapsacks or under their uniforms.
+The dispersal, says one officer, was at Napoleon’s own instance. “He
+ordered all the officers who had no troops to make the best of their
+way at once to the Niemen, considering that their services had best be
+saved for the future army he was going to Paris to raise and organise.”
+That is one story. According to another officer, utter despair at
+their frightful position, abandoned by their chief, was the cause of
+the break-up at Wilna and the final _débâcle_. “Until then a few armed
+soldiers, led by their officers, had still rallied round the Eagles.
+Now, however, the officers began to break away, and the soldiers became
+fewer and fewer, and those left were finally reduced, of necessity,
+some to conceal the Eagles in knapsacks, others to make away with
+them.” Some of the officers fell dead on the way to the Niemen, struck
+down suddenly by the cold, and their Eagles remained with them. Others
+who died, with their last strength tried to put their charges beyond
+reach of the enemy by scraping or digging holes in the frozen ground,
+and burying the Eagles.[34]
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLE OF THE OLD GUARD]
+
+The Eagle of the Old Guard recrossed the Niemen at Kovno, while Ney
+was making his final stand, defending the gate of the town; the
+marshal fighting musket in hand at the last, with less than twenty
+soldiers. That Eagle was still carried openly--the only one still so
+displayed--carried defiantly aloft on its staff, borne to the last with
+its escort in military formation, in the midst of the ranks of the 400
+men of the Old Guard who were all that were able to reach the frontier.
+
+
+AT BAY IN NORTHERN GERMANY--1813
+
+There were yet dark days in store for the Eagles after the retreat from
+Moscow was over. The tale of their misfortunes was not yet ended. There
+was yet to be the sequel to the great catastrophe; further humiliations
+in the War in Germany of 1813, and the Winter Campaign of 1814 in
+Eastern France, which followed as the consequence and result of the
+overthrow in Russia.
+
+No fewer than fifteen of the Eagles that the devotion of their officers
+brought through the retreat from Moscow are now--making allowance for
+difficulties of identification, owing to defective records--among
+the trophies of victory to be seen at Berlin and Potsdam, in Vienna,
+and also at St. Petersburg. Those in Germany are mostly kept in the
+Garrison Church of Potsdam, suspended triumphantly above the vault in
+which lies the sarcophagus of Frederick the Great. They were placed
+there of set purpose as an act of retribution, as a votive offering
+to the _manes_ of the Great Frederick; as a Prussian rejoinder to
+Napoleon’s act of wanton desecration after Jena. The four trophy Eagles
+at Vienna are in the Imperial Arsenal Museum there. Two of them are the
+spoils of Kulm; displayed together with the keys of Lyons, Langres,
+Troyes, and the fortress of Mayence, which were surrendered during the
+march of the Allies on Paris. The Russian trophy Eagles of 1813 are at
+St. Petersburg, displayed with the Eagles which fell into Russian hands
+in the retreat from Moscow.
+
+What the annihilation of the Grand Army in Russia meant for Europe,
+with what dramatic rapidity its import for the vassal states of
+Napoleon was realised and turned to account, is a familiar story.
+Prussia led the revolt at once, and all Northern Germany rose in arms
+_en masse_ to commence the “War of Liberation,” joining hands with
+Russia as the pursuing armies of the Czar crossed the frontier. Then
+Austria, after negotiations rendered abortive at the last by Napoleon’s
+infatuated pride and overweening self-confidence, threw her sword into
+the balance and turned the scale decisively against France. Napoleon’s
+hastily raised conscript levies, outnumbered and outmanœuvred, were
+defeated on battlefield after battlefield, and driven in rout across
+the Rhine to their final surrender at the gates of Paris; and then came
+the abdication of Fontainebleau.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES DIED HARD]
+
+Yet, with all that, in those dark hours of their fate the Eagles died
+hard. The trophy-collections of Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg
+testify to that. Only a percentage of the Eagles which faced their fate
+on the battlefield became spoils to the victors. Marshal Macdonald’s
+army, routed by Blücher on the Katzbach, thanks to the devotion of
+the regimental officers and some of their men, saved all its Eagles
+from the enemy except three. Ney’s army, no less roughly handled at
+Dennewitz, managed to retain in like manner all its Eagles except
+three. Vandamme’s army, annihilated and dispersed at Kulm, saved its
+Eagles all but two. Oudinot was routed at Gross Beeren, with the
+loss of guns and many prisoners; Gérard underwent the same fate near
+Magdeburg; Bertrand was surprised and defeated with heavier losses
+still; but not one Eagle was left as spoil of these disasters in the
+hands of the victorious foe.
+
+In one battle the Eagle of Napoleon’s Irish Legion was only just kept
+from being to-day among the trophies displayed in the Garrison Church
+of Potsdam over the tomb of Frederick the Great. It was immediately
+after Macdonald’s defeat on the Katzbach. The Irish Legion was one
+of the regiments in one of Macdonald’s divisions, that of General
+Puthod. They had had a hard fight of it, and their retreat was barred
+by the river Bober in flood. Under stress of the continuous attacks
+of the Prussians in ever-increasing force, the 12,000 men of Puthod’s
+Division had been reduced to barely 5,000. They had used up their
+last cartridges, and had been driven back to the river-bank, where
+the Prussian army closed in on them “in a half-moon.” The Prussians
+halted for one moment until they realised that the troops before them
+had no more ammunition. Then, aware that they had their foe at their
+mercy, they rushed forward, cheering exultantly, to deliver the _coup
+de grâce_. “All of a sudden,” describes an Irish officer, “30,000 men
+ran forward on their prey, of whom none but those who knew how to swim
+could attempt to escape.” The greater number of the French, all the
+same, jumped into the river, and took the risk of drowning rather than
+surrender. Less than five hundred got across the stream, and after
+that they had to wade waist-deep for half a mile over flooded marshes
+under a pitiless fire from the Prussian batteries. In the end only 150
+men reached dry ground alive. Among the survivors were just 40 men of
+the Irish Legion, with their Eagle--Colonel Ware, eight officers, the
+Eagle-bearer, and thirty privates. The Irish remnant made their way
+eventually to Dresden, and reported themselves to Napoleon.
+
+[Sidenote: THE IRISH EAGLE’S FIRST ESCAPE]
+
+That adventure, by the way, was the Irish Eagle’s second escape from
+falling into an enemy’s hands since Napoleon presented it to the Legion
+on the Field of Mars. On the first occasion it came within an ace of
+being now among our British trophy Eagles at Chelsea; of, indeed,
+being the first Napoleonic Eagle to be brought as spoil of war to
+England. The Irish Legion was in garrison at Flushing in 1809, when the
+fortress surrendered to the British Walcheren Expedition. On the night
+before the final capitulation, Major Lawless of the Irish Legion took
+charge of the Eagle, and in a rowing-boat made a risky passage among
+the British ships of war in front of the batteries. He escaped up the
+Scheldt to Antwerp, where he delivered the Eagle personally to Marshal
+Bernadotte. Napoleon sent for the major to Paris, decorated him for
+saving the Eagle, with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and promoted
+him lieutenant-colonel.
+
+In the disaster on the Bober also, a soldier of the 134th of the Line
+saved the Eagle of another regiment, the 147th. The two regiments, as
+the Prussians charged down on them after their cartridges gave out, in
+desperation rushed to meet their assailants with the bayonet. They were
+overpowered and hurled back in confusion to the bank of the river, all
+intermingled in the _mêlée_. The Eagle-bearer of the 147th fell dead,
+shot down, and a Prussian officer made for the Eagle. A soldier of the
+134th bayoneted the officer as he got to it, picked up the Eagle, and,
+seeing only more Prussians round him, flung himself, still holding on
+to the Eagle, into the river. The man could not swim, and was fired at
+as he floundered in the water, but he was not hit. Unable to reach the
+other side, he somehow got on to a shallow patch, and, still holding
+fast to the Eagle, kept his footing there, until, to get away from
+the hail of bullets all round him, he again risked drowning by trying
+to drift downstream. He managed to keep his head above water, and got
+over to a bed of rushes, fringing the farther bank. Creeping in there,
+still holding on closely to the Eagle, the brave fellow hid for six
+hours until dark, embedded in mud to his armpits most of the time.
+After nightfall he worked his way through and crawled ashore. Finally,
+after wandering across country for eight days, feeding on berries and
+what he could pick up, in constant peril of discovery among the hostile
+peasants and parties of Prussian dragoons scouring the district, the
+heroic soldier at length found his way to Dresden. There he was brought
+before Marshal Berthier, to whom he delivered the Eagle.
+
+[Sidenote: AT THE COST OF HIS LIFE]
+
+At the battle of the Katzbach the colonel of the 132nd of the Line
+threw away his life under the mistaken impression that he saw the
+Eagle of his regiment captured by the enemy. He was short-sighted, and
+suddenly missed it in the middle of a charge. Thinking he saw the Eagle
+being carried off by a party of Prussians he rode straight through
+the enemy at them, to fall mortally wounded halfway, with his horse
+shot beneath him. Some of the men saw the colonel fall, and charged
+after him. They got to him and carried him off the field, and in the
+retreat until a place of safety was reached, where the survivors of the
+regiment had rallied. There the officers came round to bid farewell to
+their dying chief. The Eagle-bearer of the regiment was among them,
+and he, to the amazement of all, produced the Eagle from his havresac,
+broken from its staff, and held it up before the eyes of the dying
+colonel. No enemy’s hand, he declared, had contaminated it. Finding
+himself and the Eagle, he explained, in imminent danger of capture, he
+had wrenched the Eagle off the staff and hidden it--his act causing the
+disappearance which the colonel had marked, and which had resulted in
+his fatal dash among the enemy.
+
+The 17th of the Line saved their Eagle and themselves after Vandamme’s
+defeat at Kulm, and made their way to safety, as one of the officers
+relates, after an extraordinary series of adventures. They had joined
+Vandamme’s army at the beginning of the first day’s fighting--the
+battle lasted three days--coming in after a week’s march from Dresden,
+through pouring rain most of the time. They numbered four battalions,
+4,000 men in all. Vandamme was successful on the first two days and
+the 17th by themselves routed an Austrian regiment and captured a gun.
+On the evening of the second day the French advanced again, driving
+the enemy before them into the valley of Kulm. They bivouacked on the
+ground they had won, anticipating a final triumph on the morrow. But
+during that night two Russian and Prussian army corps reinforced the
+Austrian columns unknown to the French.
+
+One of the officers of the 17th, Major Fantin des Odoards, during the
+night had his suspicions aroused about the enemy, and made a discovery;
+but Vandamme would not listen to him.
+
+He was unable to sleep, says Major Fantin, and, learning from a patrol
+that mysterious sounds were being heard in the direction in which the
+Austrians had retreated, he left the bivouac and went out alone beyond
+the outposts, to creep in the dark towards the Austrian watch-fires.
+At times, as he crawled forward, describes the major, he lay flat and
+listened with his ear to the ground. In the end he felt certain that
+he heard the tramp and stir of a vast number of men, and also the
+rumble of artillery wheels moving across the front. Apparently, from
+the direction the unseen troops were taking, they were marching to cut
+off the retreat of the army from Dresden, Napoleon’s base of operations
+throughout the campaign.
+
+Major Fantin returned to the bivouac and went at once to report to the
+general, finding him asleep. He aroused Vandamme and told what he had
+heard and suspected; only, however, to be rebuffed and rudely answered
+that he was quite mistaken. Vandamme, a surly and ill-conditioned boor
+to deal with at all times, awoke in a vile temper. “You are a fool!”
+was what he said in reply. “If the enemy are on the move at all, they
+are in retreat, trying to escape me. To-morrow will see them flying, or
+my prisoners.” With that Vandamme terminated the interview, and turned
+over and went to sleep again.
+
+[Sidenote: HEMMED IN ON EVERY SIDE]
+
+He found out his mistake all too soon. Daylight disclosed dense swarms
+of Austrians, Prussians, and Russians in front of Vandamme, on his
+flanks, and closing on his rear; outnumbering him nearly four to one.
+It was a desperate position, for the only road by which Vandamme
+might retreat was held by the enemy. Little time was left to him to
+deliberate what to do. He was in the act of forming up his columns in
+a mass to try to fight his way through, when the enemy attacked in
+overpowering force. Before noon that day, out of 30,000 men, 10,000 had
+fallen. Seven thousand more were wounded or prisoners. The rest were
+fugitives, flying for shelter and hiding-places in the woods round
+the battlefield. All the French guns and baggage had been taken, and
+Vandamme himself was a prisoner, together with many officers of rank.
+The “annals of modern warfare record few instances of defeat more
+complete than that of Vandamme at Kulm.”
+
+The only regiment that kept its order was the 17th, and it before
+the crisis had lost heavily. Its colonel and two of the _chefs de
+bataillon_ had been killed; the two others were wounded. Only some
+1,700 of the 4,000 men remained. It rested with Major Fantin, as senior
+officer, to save those that were left and the Eagle.
+
+The 17th were on the extreme right of the battle, where they had been
+posted as support to Vandamme’s artillery. They held their ground as
+long as possible, but the enemy closed in on them, overlapping them
+on both flanks, and then stormed and captured the guns. The 17th were
+isolated and in imminent peril--surrender or destruction were the only
+alternatives before them.
+
+[Sidenote: “EN HAUT L’AIGLE!”]
+
+Looking round, the major, as he describes, marked a wooded hill some
+little way off, and decided to make for that. There was just time
+to get away before the enemy closed in on them. He sent off all
+his tirailleurs, about 400 men, to skirmish and hold in check the
+advancing Austrians. As they went off he shouted to the rest: “En haut
+l’Aigle! Ralliement au drapeau!” (“Display the Eagle! All rally to the
+standard!”) The men of the regiment formed round him quickly, and the
+major pointed out the wooded hill to them with his sword. “All of you
+disperse at once,” he told them, “and make your way there as quickly
+as you can. You will find the Eagle of the regiment there, and me with
+it!” The 17th broke up and scattered, and, under the protection of the
+skirmishers, aided by the opportune mist which hung low over the ground
+after the heavy rains of the past week, they made off in groups in
+the direction pointed out. All just got past the enemy in time, Major
+Fantin and two officers accompanying the Eagle.
+
+An hour later, “_nos débris_,” as the major puts it, were straggling up
+the hill, where they again rallied round the Eagle. The skirmishers,
+cleverly withdrawn at the right moment, evaded the enemy also, and
+most of them joined their comrades on the hill, where all silently
+drew together. They then moved off, to halt for concealment in a
+wooded glade behind. They stayed there, keeping quiet and lying down
+beside their arms, for several hours; off the track of the pursuit,
+and undiscovered by the enemy. “We were all very hungry and without
+anything but what cartridges we had still left.”
+
+At nightfall they moved away in the direction in which Dresden was
+judged to be, without having a single map or anything to guide them.
+They marched all night, mostly by a forest road, and keeping their
+direction by means of occasional glimpses of the stars seen through
+rifts in the cloudy sky overhead. More than once they had to halt
+as the enemy were heard on the move not far off. They groped their
+way forward with extreme caution, not a light being struck, and the
+necessary words of command being spoken in an undertone, until after
+midnight. Then they suddenly came into the open round a bend of the
+road, and discovered, not half a mile off in front, the numerous
+watch-fires of a large body of troops. “The column halted at the sight
+like one man and stood in absolute silence. Who were those in front of
+us? Friends or the enemy?”
+
+Two scouts were sent forward to try to find out. They were away for
+half an hour; an interval of intense suspense and anxiety to the
+others. At the end of the time the two scouts came rushing back. They
+brought unexpectedly good news. It was a French bivouac: that of the
+14th Army Corps--Marshal St. Cyr’s. So the 17th and their Eagle were
+saved.
+
+Other Eagles that got away from the rout at Kulm and rejoined the army
+owed their safety to the determination of small groups of officers and
+men who cut their way through the enemy. “Officers fought with their
+swords, privates with their bayonets and the butts of their muskets:
+and as the struggle was to escape and not to destroy, a push and
+wrestle, or a blow, which might suffice to throw the individual struck
+out of the way of the striker, prevented in many instances the more
+deadly thrust.” Finally, as the 17th had done, they found shelter among
+the woods and ravines of the neighbourhood, and lay low there until the
+enemy had moved off towards Töplitz, whereupon they made their way to
+Dresden. The cavalry saved their Eagles by cutting their way through
+the enemy. They suffered heavy losses, but succeeded in their effort.
+Their commander, General Corbineau, “presented himself, wounded and
+covered with blood, before Napoleon”; it was his arrival that announced
+the disaster. The Eagles of the 33rd and the 106th of the Line taken at
+Kulm are at Vienna.
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLE-TROPHIES OF LEIPSIC]
+
+The three days of battle at Leipsic, between October 16 and 19,
+1813, cost Napoleon 60,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners,
+and 300 guns; but not more than 6 Eagles were among the trophies of
+battalion-flags and squadron-colours taken or found on the field, now
+at Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
+
+One Eagle was lost during the first day’s fighting at Leipsic--taken
+on the 16th by Blücher from Ney’s corps; but no others were lost until
+the end. The 80,000 men who were able to make good their retreat with
+Napoleon across the bridge over the Elster before it was prematurely
+blown up, through a non-commissioned officer’s blunder, carried their
+Eagles with them. What colour-trophies came into the possession of
+the Allies were taken amid the final scenes of carnage; from cut-off
+battalions of the three divisions left behind on the right bank of
+the river, victims of the destruction of the bridge. They were mostly
+captured in the ferocious hand-to-hand fighting which marked the
+closing phase of the battle in the suburbs of Leipsic. The French
+defended themselves there to the last with the courage of despair among
+the fortified villas and loopholed garden walls. “Pressed upon by
+superior numbers, and fighting, now in the streets, now in the houses,
+now through gardens or other enclosures, the single end which they
+could accomplish or which in point of fact they seemed to desire, was
+that they might sell their lives at the dearest rate possible.” Two at
+least of the Eagles now at Berlin were hastily buried in gardens during
+the last stand, and were dug up there later when the ground was being
+turned over.
+
+[Sidenote: AMIDST THE ROUT AT LEIPSIC]
+
+Forced to give back before their ever-increasing enemies, not a few
+of the French “preferred death to captivity, and fought to the last.
+These, retiring through by-lanes and covered passages, made their way
+to the river, some where the ruins of the bridge covered its banks,
+some above and others below that point, and, plunging into the deep
+water, endeavoured to gain the opposite shore by swimming, an attempt
+in which comparatively few succeeded.”
+
+The three doomed divisions of Lauriston, Regnier, and Poniatowski, who
+were cut off by the blowing up of the bridge, had, as it happened,
+not many Eagles among them to lose. They were largely made up of
+newly raised conscript regiments to whom Napoleon had not yet awarded
+Eagles; regiments not yet entitled to carry Eagles, according to the
+later regulations that Napoleon had laid down. Only four of the newly
+raised regiments altogether, so far during the campaign in Germany,
+had qualified for the honour. They had received their Eagles with the
+customary ceremony at the hands of Napoleon: three of them on October
+15, the day before the battle of Leipsic opened. The fourth had
+received its Eagle at Dresden a month earlier. Two of these four Eagles
+only were lost to the enemy at Leipsic.
+
+The Eagle-bearers of four or five other regiments among those cut off
+by the bridge disaster tried to swim across the Elster with their
+Eagles. Their fate is unknown; probably they were drowned in the
+attempt. Other Eagle-bearers, before surrendering, were seen to fling
+their Eagles into the river to sink there.
+
+How one Eagle, during the battle on the 18th, was momentarily lost, and
+then regained by a splendid act of valour, is told by Caulaincourt,
+who was on Napoleon’s staff, and witnessed the gallant deed that
+won the Eagle back. In the midst of the fighting, a number of Saxon
+regiments abandoned Napoleon’s cause and went over _en masse_ to
+the enemy. To signalise their defection they turned on the nearest
+French regiment and mobbed it; attacking it at close quarters with
+the bayonet. Thrown into confusion by the unexpected onslaught, the
+French were for the moment broken and forced back, whereupon the
+Saxons, making for the Eagle, got possession of it. “A young officer of
+Hussars,” relates Caulaincourt, “whose name I forget, rushed headlong
+into the enemies’ ranks. In the charge some of the miserable renegades
+had carried off one of our Eagles. The gallant young officer rescued
+it, but at the cost of his life. He threw the Eagle at the Emperor’s
+feet, and then he himself fell, mortally wounded and bathed in blood.
+The Emperor was deeply moved. ‘With such men,’ he exclaimed, ‘what
+resources does not France possess!’”
+
+The regiments left by Napoleon to garrison the fortresses in Germany,
+at Stettin, at Magdeburg, Torgau, Dantzic, and elsewhere, previous to
+surrendering took steps to prevent their Eagles falling into the hands
+of their adversaries. In every case they destroyed them, smashing
+the Eagles into small fragments, which were either distributed among
+officers and men, or else thrown into the ditch of the fortress. In
+more than one case they melted the Eagles down, and broke up and
+buried the metal, while the flags were burned.
+
+[Sidenote: KEPT FROM THE HANDS OF THE FOE]
+
+At Dresden, where Marshal St. Cyr had to surrender, a month after
+Leipsic, the terms granted by the Austrian general conducting the siege
+allowed the troops to return to France with their arms, their baggage,
+and their Eagles, seven in number. Superior authority, however,
+cancelled the privilege. The garrison had already started on their
+march when, to their utter consternation, the capitulation was abruptly
+annulled by the Austrian Generalissimo, Schwartzenberg, with the result
+that the hapless troops were compelled to yield themselves prisoners
+at discretion. The soldiers were defenceless and could only submit to
+their hard fate. They did not, however, let their seven Eagles pass
+into the enemy’s hands. Five of the seven were broken up, and the flags
+torn to pieces and divided among the regiments. Two of the Eagles,
+those of the 25th of the Line and the 85th, were concealed intact by
+two officers, who kept them from discovery for months, while they were
+prisoners in Hungary. After the Peace, in the following year, they
+brought them back to France--to meet there the doom that awaited all
+the Eagles of Napoleon of which the officials of the Bourbon _régime_
+got possession.
+
+One memento of the Winter Campaign in Eastern France is now at the
+Invalides--the Eagle of the 5th of the Line. It was found in the
+river Aube at Arcis after the battle there, which, in its result,
+decided the fate of Napoleon; its outcome being the immediate march of
+the Allied armies on Paris. The 5th was one of the regiments of the
+rearguard column, under Oudinot, half of which was drowned in the river
+in trying to get across at night, after stubbornly holding out in the
+town all the afternoon in order to enable Napoleon to cross the river
+in safety. The 5th was one of the regiments that sacrificed themselves.
+Its Eagle-bearer was among the drowned, and his Eagle sank with him. It
+remained in the bed of the stream until long afterwards, when it was
+accidentally discovered, and fished up.
+
+The 132nd of the Line of the modern army of France commemorates on its
+flag a feat of arms done under the Eagle of the old 132nd of Napoleon’s
+Army, after having been saved from the Prussians at the Katzbach,
+and again at Leipsic. It was in one of the fights in the closing
+campaign in Eastern France. The proud legend inscribed in golden
+letters, “Rosny, 1814: Un contre huit,” commemorates how the regiment,
+single-handed, held at bay and beat off an enemy eight times its force,
+saving itself for the third time, and its Eagle.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GRAND ARMY’S LAST PARADE]
+
+The surviving Eagles of the war, the last to face the enemy in the
+north of those presented on the Field of Mars, paid their last salute
+to the War Lord at Napoleon’s final review of the remnants of the
+Grand Army at Rheims on March 15, 1814.
+
+A pitiful, a moving, sight was that hapless military spectacle: the
+closing parade before Napoleon of his last remaining soldiers.
+
+This is how Alison describes it: “How different from the splendid
+military spectacles of the Tuileres or Chammartin, which had so often
+dazzled his sight with the pomp of apparently irresistible power!
+Wasted away to half the numbers which they possessed when they crossed
+the Marne a fortnight before, the greater part of the regiments
+exhibited only the skeletons of military array. In some, more officers
+than privates were to be seen in the ranks; in all, the appearance
+of the troops, the haggard air of the men, their worn-out uniforms,
+and the strange motley of which they were composed, bespoke the total
+exhaustion of the Empire. It was evident to all that Napoleon was
+expending his last resources. Besides the veterans of the Guard--the
+iron men whom nothing could daunt, but whose tattered garments and
+soiled accoutrements bespoke the dreadful fatigue to which they had
+been subjected--were to be seen young conscripts, but recently torn
+from the embraces of maternal love, and whose wan visages and faltering
+steps told but too clearly that they were unequal to the weight of the
+arms they bore. The gaunt figures and woeful aspect of the horses,
+the broken carriages and blackened mouths of the guns, the crazy and
+fractured artillery wagons which defiled past, the general confusion
+of arms, battalions, and uniforms, even in the best appointed corps,
+spoke of the mere remains of the vast military army which had so long
+stood triumphant against the world in arms. The soldiers exhibited none
+of their ancient enthusiasm as they defiled past the Emperor; silent
+and sad they took their way before him: the stern realities of war had
+chased away its enthusiastic ardour. All felt that in this dreadful
+contest they themselves would perish, happy if they had not previously
+witnessed the degradation of France!”[35]
+
+What is indeed the most interesting of all the Eagles, the most famous
+battle-standard in the world, which for a time was at the Invalides, is
+at present preserved in private hands in Paris--the Eagle of Napoleon’s
+Old Guard, the Eagle of the “Adieu of Fontainebleau.” It is treasured
+with devoted care in the family of the officer who commanded the
+Grenadiers of the Guard in the retreat from Moscow, at Fontainebleau,
+and at Waterloo--General Petit. It is kept in the house, in Paris, in
+which the old general died, in the room he used as his _salon_. General
+Petit refused to be parted from the Eagle of his regiment during his
+lifetime; he kept it with him wherever he went, always in his personal
+care. It was at the Invalides while General Petit was in residence
+there as Governor of the Hospital.
+
+[Sidenote: THE OLD GUARD AT FONTAINEBLEAU]
+
+On that never-to-be-forgotten April forenoon of 1814, in the Court of
+the White Horse of the Château of Fontainebleau, Napoleon embraced the
+standard, and taking the Eagle in his hands, kissed it in front of the
+veteran Grenadiers of the Old Guard. His travelling carriage, to convey
+the fallen Emperor on the first stage of his journey to Elba, was in
+waiting, close by, ready to start. Twelve hundred Grenadiers of the
+Guard stood with presented arms all round the courtyard; drawn up in a
+great hollow square as a guard of honour to render to the master they
+adored the parting salute.
+
+Napoleon passed slowly round the square and inspected the ranks, man
+by man, looking intently into the scarred and war-worn, weather-beaten
+old faces, each one of which was familiar to him. Their station on
+every battlefield had been close at hand to where he took up his post.
+Night after night, in every campaign from Austerlitz to those last
+dreadful weeks, he had slept in their midst; his tent always pitched
+in the centre of the camp of the Imperial Guard. That had been
+Napoleon’s invariable custom in war. They had shared with him that
+last forlorn-hope march to save Paris, until, completely worn out and
+footsore, exhausted nature forbade their attempting to go farther. With
+tears streaming from their eyes the old soldiers, before whose bayonets
+in the charge no Continental foe had ever stood, mutely returned
+Napoleon’s last wistful, pathetic look of farewell.
+
+He addressed a few touching words to them, standing in the centre of
+the square. Next he turned to General Petit, near at hand, and before
+them he took the general in his arms, as representing all, and kissed
+him on the cheek. “I cannot embrace you all,” exclaimed Napoleon in a
+voice broken with emotion, yet which all could hear distinctly, “so I
+embrace your General!” Then he motioned to the Porte-Aigle, standing
+all the while before him, with the Eagle held in the attitude of salute.
+
+“Bring me the Eagle,” he said, “that I may embrace it also!” “Que
+m’apporte l’Aigle, que je l’embrasse aussi!” were Napoleon’s words.
+
+The Porte-Aigle advanced and again inclined the Eagle forward to the
+Emperor. Napoleon took hold of it, embraced and kissed it three times,
+tears in his eyes, and displaying the deepest emotion.
+
+[Illustration: NAPOLEON’S FAREWELL TO THE OLD GUARD AT FONTAINEBLEAU.
+
+From a print after H. Vernet, kindly lent by Messrs. T. H. Parker, 45,
+Whitcomb Street.]
+
+“Ah, chère Aigle,” he exclaimed, “que les baisers que je te donne
+retentissent dans la postérité.”
+
+The Eagle-bearer then stepped back a pace.
+
+“Adieu, mes enfants! Adieu, mes braves! Entourez moi encore une fois!”
+were Napoleon’s closing words as the historic scene terminated.
+
+The old soldiers all stood utterly broken down, weeping bitter tears,
+overcome with grief, as Napoleon made his way to the carriage; the
+members of the Household bowing low as he passed, and kissing his hand,
+were all also in tears.
+
+Finally, amid a mournful cry of “Vive l’Empereur!” Napoleon drove away.
+
+[Sidenote: ASHES MINGLED WITH WINE]
+
+As soon as Napoleon’s carriage was beyond the precincts, the Grenadiers
+of the Guard solemnly lowered the Imperial Standard, flying above the
+Château. There, in the courtyard, they burned it. Then, mixing the
+ashes in a barrel of wine that was brought out, they handed round the
+liquor in bowls and drank off the draught, pledging Napoleon with cries
+of “Vive l’Empereur!” So it is related by one who was an eye-witness
+and a partaker; one of the officers of the Old Guard.
+
+Kept safely in concealment for ten months by General Petit, during
+the Bourbon Restoration period in 1814, the Eagle of the Old Guard
+appeared once more after the return from Elba. It faced the enemy for
+the last time at Waterloo. Something of that will be said further on.
+General Petit kept close beside it all through the retreat, during that
+night of horror after Waterloo; a faithful band of devoted veterans
+accompanying him and surrounding the Eagle. So it made its final return
+to France, to be preserved for the rest of his life by the man who,
+above all others, had most right to be custodian of the Eagle of the
+Old Guard.
+
+The Bourbon War Minister ordered it to be given up, to be burned
+at the artillery dépôt at Vincennes with the other Eagles that the
+Restoration officials were able to get hold of. General Petit flatly
+and indignantly refused to part with the Eagle of the Old Guard. He was
+able, as before, to conceal it successfully, in spite of every effort
+to discover its whereabouts, until after the Revolution of 1830. Then,
+at the last, it was safe.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FLAG OF THE OLD GUARD]
+
+Faded and frayed away in parts, the gold embroidery on it dulled and
+tarnished from the lapse of years, and torn here and there round the
+jagged bullet-holes in the silk, is now, in its old age, the Flag of
+the Old Guard. As it was at first--as it was when it made its débût at
+the opening of its career, on that December afternoon on the Field of
+Mars--the flag is of rich crimson silk, fringed with gold, sprinkled
+over on both sides with golden bees, and with, at the corners,
+encircled in golden laurel-wreaths, the Imperial cypher, the letter
+“N.” In shape it was--and of course is still--almost a square: a metre
+deep, vertically, on the staff, and some half-dozen inches more than
+that lengthwise, horizontally, in the fly. On one side, in the centre,
+the Napoleonic Eagle is displayed, a gold embroidered Eagle poised on a
+thunderbolt. Inscribed round the Eagle in letters of gold is the legend:
+
+                            “GARDE IMPÉRIALE
+
+                          L’EMPEREUR NAPOLÉON
+                         AU 1^{ER} RÉGIMENT DES
+                          GRENADIERS À PIED.”
+
+On the other side are inscribed these fifteen names of Napoleon’s great
+days in war, also in golden letters: “Marengo; Ulm; Austerlitz; Jéna;
+Berlin; Eylau; Friedland; Madrid; Eckmühl; Essling; Wagram; Vienna;
+Smolensk; Moskowa; Moscow.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THAT TERRIBLE MIDNIGHT AT THE INVALIDES
+
+
+The Battalion Eagles of 1804, those of the second and third battalions
+withdrawn by the decree of 1808, together with the Light Cavalry
+(Hussar, Chasseur, and Dragoon) Eagles recalled in the autumn of 1805,
+and a number of Light Infantry Eagles returned to the Ministry of War
+at the end of 1807, perished in the flames of the great holocaust of
+trophy-flags at the Invalides on the night of March 30, 1814, the night
+of the surrender of Paris to the Allies.
+
+It was on that tragic Wednesday night that the great sacrifice was
+made, amid the bowed and weeping old soldiers of France, the veterans
+of a hundred battlefields, on the most terrible and mournful occasion
+in the wide-ranging annals of the great institution which the Grand
+Monarque, in the full pride of his power, at the topmost pinnacle of
+his renown, founded and opened in person with grandiose martial pomp
+and State display. All was over for France on that night--
+
+     “Around a slaughtered army lay,
+      No more to conquer and to bleed:
+      The power and glory of the war
+      Had passed to the victorious Czar.”
+
+The two marshals charged with the defence of Paris, Marmont and
+Mortier, had on that afternoon placed the submission of the capital
+in the hands of Alexander of Russia on the heights of Montmartre,
+whence, and from the Buttes Chaumont and the other northern heights
+from right to left, 300 loaded cannon pointed threateningly down over
+the vanquished and panic-stricken city, supported by the bayonets
+and sabres of 120,000 men, Russians and Prussians, Bavarians,
+Würtemburgers, and Austrians, flushed and exultant in their hour of
+supreme triumph, the soldiers of all the nations of the Continent at
+war with Napoleon.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON WITHIN TWELVE MILES]
+
+It was at ten o’clock on that fateful night for France that the great
+destruction of trophies at the Invalides took place. Napoleon had set
+his last stake, had attempted his desperate last manœuvre, and had
+failed. He had been foiled and baffled when within reach almost of his
+goal. At that very hour indeed, only twelve miles away, he had just
+been stopped in his wild midnight gallop, his final forlorn-hope effort
+to reach the capital, by the news that all hope was past, that the
+worst had happened, that Paris had fallen.
+
+Only forty-eight hours before, on Monday night, at Saint-Dizier, a
+small town 170 miles away, had Napoleon suddenly realised the gravity
+of the catastrophe impending over Paris. He was at that moment in
+the act of dealing the Allies a counter-stroke which he confidently
+believed would save the situation and bring the enemy’s advance to a
+general stand. Just a week before, he had abruptly turned back in his
+retreat towards the capital and had boldly started to march across the
+rear of the Allies in the direction of the Rhine. He would sever their
+communications; he would cut the enemy off from their base. Calling out
+the _levée en masse_ of the peasantry all over Eastern France, and at
+the same time rallying to him the garrisons of the French fortresses
+in Alsace and Lorraine, with 100,000 men at his disposal, led by Ney,
+Macdonald, Victor, and Oudinot, while two other marshals, Marmont
+and Mortier, held the enemy at bay in front of Paris, he was looking
+forward to checkmate the Allies at the last moment and paralyse their
+advance on the capital. It was a daring and masterly project; but the
+Fortune of War was against Napoleon. He had sent word of his plans
+to Marie Louise at the Tuileries, together with instructions to his
+brother Joseph, Governor of Paris, but on the way a Cossack patrol
+captured the bearer of the vitally important documents. Napoleon’s
+despatch for once was not in cypher, and its full import was apparent
+instantly. It was carried to the Czar Alexander, and forthwith laid
+before a hastily convened Russian council of war. Another letter, taken
+at the same time, laid bare the critical condition of affairs inside
+Paris itself; describing how all was in confusion there, and that
+treachery to the cause of the Empire was at work within the city. The
+council of war decided to pay no heed to Napoleon’s counter-stroke,
+and, instead, to march at once on Paris in full force. Marmont and
+Mortier, it was known, could barely muster 6,000 regulars. With
+Blücher’s Prussians, at that moment on the point of joining them,
+the Allies could bring into line not far short of 150,000 men. This
+final plan was agreed to on the afternoon of Friday, March 24, and the
+general advance began at once.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S BLANK DISMAY]
+
+Napoleon knew nothing of what was happening until late on the night of
+the 27th, the following Monday. Then he was suddenly made aware of the
+full position. “Nothing,” exclaimed the doomed Emperor in blank dismay,
+“but a thunderbolt can save us now.” The Allies then had not turned
+back! The enemy nearest him, whom he had planned to attack next day,
+believing them to be the Russian main army, was only--he discovered
+at the last moment--a cavalry division, sent back to delude him and
+prevent his finding out what was really going on. And the troops
+advancing on Paris were already three clear days ahead of him! Napoleon
+counter-marched his whole force at once to hasten to the rescue of the
+capital. They would take the route by Sens, Troyes, and Fontainebleau,
+making a sweep to keep clear of the enemy’s columns, and approach
+Paris by the south bank of the Seine. It was a long march of fully 180
+miles, but there was no other way open. Marmont and Mortier, to whom
+the news of Napoleon’s intended approach was sent off immediately, must
+manage to hold out in front of the city on the north bank until the
+Emperor arrived.
+
+Fresh news, however, and yet more serious, as to the imminence of
+the grave peril threatening Paris, reached Napoleon during Tuesday
+night. Leaving the army to follow, he pressed forward ahead of the
+troops by himself in his travelling-carriage, escorted only by the Old
+Guard. They hurried forward with feverish eagerness all that night
+and the next day, the men of the Guard panting along at the double in
+their effort to keep up. With hardly a halt, they struggled along,
+famishing--most of the men had tasted no cooked food for the past five
+days--shoeless most of them, plodding and splashing barefoot through
+the mud, ankle deep; under a pitiless downpour of rain all the time.
+By Wednesday evening, the 30th, they had reached Troyes, after a forty
+miles march without a stop. There, still worse news reached Napoleon.
+Marmont and Mortier had been disastrously defeated at Meaux, and in
+consequence their defence of the northern heights outside the city was
+all but hopeless.
+
+[Sidenote: AT FULL GALLOP FOR PARIS]
+
+Napoleon, on that, abandoned his travelling-carriage for a light
+post-chaise, which set off at a gallop. He must now risk a ride
+practically unattended, in the desperate hope of being able to evade
+hostile patrols and get by stealth into the city. Once there, he
+would himself take charge of the defence. The men of the Old Guard
+were left behind at Troyes. They were worn out and unable, from sheer
+exhaustion, to go a step farther. Only a troop of Cuirassiers rode with
+the post-chaise, and most of these had to give up and drop back as the
+chaise raced forward, Napoleon himself from time to time calling from
+the windows to the postillions to keep on flogging the horses and go
+faster and faster. At every stopping-place to change horses the Emperor
+sent off a courier to tell Paris to hold out; and at each post-house
+he received still more alarming messages from the city. Now he heard
+that the Empress and his little son had had to fly from Paris. Then
+he learned that the whole city was in a state of complete panic, with
+affrighted peasants from all round crowding in; the shops and banks all
+shut; the theatres closed, a thing that had not happened even at the
+height of the Reign of Terror; everywhere chaos and hopeless despair.
+After that came the news that the enemy were advancing so fast that
+they were expected at any moment before the City barriers.
+
+At ten o’clock Napoleon arrived at the village of Fromenteau, near
+the Fountains of Juvisy, twelve and a half miles from Paris. The
+post-chaise had to stop there again for a relay of fresh horses. As it
+drew up, a party of soldiers passed by, coming from the direction of
+the capital. Not knowing who was in the chaise, some of them shouted
+out to the occupants, Napoleon, and Caulaincourt, who had been riding
+with the Emperor: “Paris has surrendered!”
+
+The dread news struck Napoleon like a bullet between the eyes. “It is
+impossible! The men are mad!” he hissed out, gripping at the cushions
+of his seat. Then he turned to his companion: “Find an officer and
+bring him to me!”
+
+One rode up, as it happened, at that moment, a General Belliard.
+Napoleon questioned him eagerly, and he gave the Emperor sufficient
+details to leave no doubt of what had befallen. Great drops of sweat
+stood on Napoleon’s forehead. He turned, quivering with excitement, to
+Caulaincourt. “Do you hear that?” he ejaculated hoarsely, fixing a gaze
+on his companion under the light of the lamps, the bare memory of which
+made Caulaincourt shudder ever after to his dying day.
+
+They left the chaise, and looking across the Seine Napoleon saw to
+the north and east, in the direction of Villeneuve Saint-Georges, the
+glare of the enemy’s watch-fires. Marshal Berthier now came up in a
+second post-chaise which had been following the Emperor’s. Speaking
+excitedly, Napoleon declared that he would go on to Paris. He set off
+walking rapidly along the road in the dark, leaving the horses to be
+put to and the post-chaise to pick him up. Berthier and Caulaincourt
+attended him, and General Belliard and some dragoons followed at a few
+paces behind. Napoleon rejected every remonstrance and refused to turn
+back. “I asked them,” exclaimed Napoleon, talking half to himself, half
+to his companions, “to hold out for only twenty-four hours! Miserable
+wretches! Marmont swore that he would be cut to pieces rather than
+yield! And Joseph ran away: my own brother! To surrender the capital
+to the enemy: what poltroons!” So he went on in a breathless torrent
+of words. He added finally: “They have capitulated: betrayed their
+country; betrayed their Emperor; degraded France! It is too terrible!
+Every one has lost his head! When I am not there they do nothing but
+add blunder to blunder.”
+
+[Sidenote: “MISERABLE WRETCHES!”]
+
+But to go on, with Paris in the hands of an army of 150,000 men,
+was out of the question. Napoleon had to bow to the inevitable. He
+at length yielded to the protests of the others. He stopped beside
+the Fountains of Juvisy. “He sat down on the parapet of one of the
+fountains,” described Labédoyère, an eye-witness, “and remained above
+a quarter of an hour with his head resting on his hands, lost in the
+most painful reflections.” Then he rose, went back to the post-chaise,
+and, telling General Belliard to rally all the men he could at Essonne,
+set off to drive to Fontainebleau. He reached there at six next morning.
+
+Between ten o’clock on Wednesday night and six o’clock on Thursday
+morning the tragedy at the Invalides was enacted. Its opening scene
+took place just as Napoleon’s post-chaise was drawing up in the village
+of Fromenteau. Its final scene took place just as the post-chaise was
+entering the courtyard of Fontainebleau.
+
+The Capitulation of Paris was signed before the Barrier of La Villette
+at five in the afternoon. Its first article laid down that the French
+army must evacuate Paris within twelve hours: before five o’clock next
+morning. The last clause recommended the city to the mercy of the
+Allied Sovereigns, and of the Czar Alexander in particular.
+
+All day long the booming of cannon and rattle of musketry had dinned
+in the ears of the trembling and terrified Parisians, ever steadily
+drawing nearer. The marshals, Marmont and Mortier, had made their last
+stand, and, resisting desperately to the last, in a struggle in which
+the Allies lost two to every one of the defenders, so ferocious was the
+contest, had been beaten back into the city. They carried back with
+them, so gallantly had they counter-attacked at one point, the standard
+of the Second Squadron of the Russian Garde du Corps--now a trophy in
+the present collection at the Invalides.
+
+[Sidenote: BEYOND ALL HOPE NOW]
+
+The outnumbered and exhausted troops could make no further fight,
+although, to the end, many of the soldiers were for holding out to
+the last cartridge. The _Générale_ had beaten to arms at two in the
+morning; at six, with sunrise, the enemy’s guns opened fire; from then
+until late in the afternoon the fighting had gone on incessantly.
+
+All was over by four o’clock. From east to west, from Charenton and
+Belleville, right round to Neuilly, the Allies, the Russians, Blücher’s
+Prussians, and the Austrians, had captured every position capable of
+defence, one after the other, by sheer weight of numbers, and had
+carried at the point of the bayonet every place of vantage held by the
+French. Woronzeff and the Prince of Würtemburg had stormed Romainville,
+La Villette, and La Chapelle. Langeron and the Russian Imperial Guard
+were masters of the heights of Montmartre and the Buttes Chaumont,
+looking down directly on Paris. Eighty-six guns had been taken from the
+marshals since the morning; nearly six thousand soldiers and National
+Guards had fallen, killed or wounded, facing the foe. A six-miles
+long line of batteries and battalions on the side of the Allies had
+closed in to within short musket range of the Paris barriers. Already
+the Russian cannon were opening fire on the city, and their shells
+were bursting over the central streets of Paris; falling, some in the
+Chaussée d’Antin and on the Boulevard des Italiens.
+
+At four o’clock Marmont, who had been the soul of the defence,
+fighting, now on horseback, now on foot, using his sword at times--“the
+marshal was seen everywhere in the thickest of the fight, a dozen or
+more soldiers were bayoneted at his side, and his hat was riddled
+with bullets”--at four o’clock Marmont repassed within the barriers
+to announce that further defence was impossible. He was scarcely
+recognisable, we are told--“he had a beard of eight days’ growth; the
+great-coat which covered his uniform was in tatters; from head to foot
+he was blackened with powder-smoke.” Then had to be done the only thing
+that was left to do. Marmont and Mortier held a hasty conference, and
+after it a trumpeter and an aide de camp carrying a white flag rode out
+through the firing line to the nearest advanced post of the Allies. The
+officer was taken before the Czar Alexander on the plateau of Chaumont,
+and Paris surrendered. The last sounds that were heard on the French
+side as the firing ceased came from a battalion of the Imperial Guard
+which had been serving under Marmont, from a scanty remnant of veterans
+stubbornly resisting at bay to the last--shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”
+
+[Sidenote: THE FLAG OF THE POLYTECHNIC]
+
+The old pensioners of the Invalides manfully did their duty, and bore
+their part in the defence all day, as well as they were able. All
+who could carry a musket had gone out to the barriers; others did
+their best by helping to bring up ammunition. Most of them fought
+at the Barrière du Trône on the Vincennes road, assisting the brave
+lads of the Polytechnic School to hold the post and man a battery of
+eight-and-twenty cannon in front of the barrier; until a headlong
+charge of Russian cavalry, Pahlen’s dragoons with some Cossacks,
+swooped down from the flank, annihilating the devoted band of gunners.
+Those of the boys who were left, however, saved the school flag,
+presented to the Polytechnic just ten years before by the Emperor with
+his own hand, on the Day of the Eagles on the Field of Mars. With the
+Invalides’ veterans and some of the National Guards, the survivors
+held the barrier throughout the day to the end, beating back repeated
+attempts of the Russians to storm the gate. The lads, finally, after
+learning that Marmont had capitulated, made their way back to the
+school, and there burned their precious standard to save it from
+falling into the enemy’s hands. Those who were left of the veterans
+hastened back to the Invalides at the same time, overcome with anxiety
+to learn what was to happen to their own priceless treasures within the
+Hospital, the trophy flags. There were at the Invalides at that time,
+by one account, 1417 trophy flags; according to another account--which
+included apparently in the total the returned Battalion and Light
+Infantry and Cavalry Eagles--altogether 1,800 standards.
+
+Within the walls of the Invalides all was deep gloom and hopeless
+despondency among those in charge. Even at nightfall, as it would
+appear, the authorities had not made up their minds how the trophies
+were to be disposed of.
+
+It is a hapless and pitiful story from first to last. Some time
+previously, while the Allied armies were still being kept at bay on
+the plains of Champagne, the Governor of the Invalides, old Marshal
+Serrurier, a distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary Army, had
+applied to the Minister of War for instructions as to the disposal of
+the trophies at the Invalides in the event of the enemy advancing on
+Paris. The only answer he received was a formal letter to the effect
+that the matter would have to go before the Emperor. At that time
+Napoleon was in the midst of his last forlorn-hope attempt to stem the
+tide of invasion; in the midst of a life-and-death struggle, fighting
+desperately day after day at one place or another. The Ministry of War
+apparently pigeon-holed the application after that, and forgot all
+about the trophies at the Invalides until the actual day of the attack
+on Paris--until that Wednesday forenoon.
+
+[Sidenote: FORGOTTEN UNTIL TOO LATE]
+
+Then, when already Marmont’s outer line of defence had been forced,
+and the last fight for the inner heights overlooking the city was
+raging furiously, almost within sight from the Invalides, a letter
+from the War Minister was handed to Serrurier. It “trusted that the
+Marshal had taken steps for the safety of the trophies; especially
+for the preservation of Frederick the Great’s sword. The flags,”
+continued the letter, “had best be detached from their staves, and
+rolled up carefully. The War Minister is sure that your Excellency
+will do all that is possible. The road to the Loire is open.” Such
+were the instructions sent to the Invalides after the eleventh hour!
+Then, during the afternoon, when the enemy’s bombshells, fired from the
+plateau of Chaumont, were falling in the heart of the city, a single
+artillery wagon, or fourgon, a vehicle barely large enough to remove
+a small percentage of what there was to carry away, drew up at the
+main gates of the Invalides. It brought also ten more trophy flags,
+collected from somewhere in Paris. In the general confusion nobody,
+it would seem, even inquired what they were or where they came from.
+The driver’s instructions were merely that “they were to go away with
+the Invalides trophies.” The ten flags were taken out and stacked in a
+corridor for the time being, while the fourgon waited unheeded at the
+gate until after dark.
+
+What steps Marshal Serrurier took during the afternoon to secure
+adequate transport is unknown; or, indeed, what he did with himself
+all that time. The Governor was seen just before the dinner-hour in
+the Corridor d’Avignon, in an out-of-the-way part of the building, in
+conference with the Lieutenant-Governor and an adjutant-major. Another
+officer, Adjutant Vollerand, was with them, holding in his hands
+Frederick the Great’s sword and sash. Apparently they did not want to
+be observed, and were discussing how to hide the relics or bury them
+within the precincts of the Invalides. After that nothing more was seen
+of Serrurier at the Invalides until between nine and ten at night, some
+hours after the Capitulation, and when it had become known that the
+Allies intended to occupy Paris in force, and that their troops would
+enter and take possession of the city early next morning. Then the
+Governor reappeared.
+
+A few minutes after nine o’clock the veterans of the Invalides, who
+had been restlessly pacing about the halls and corridors during the
+evening, or standing about in dejected groups in the courtyards, not
+knowing what they were to do, were suddenly summoned to muster at once
+in the Grand Court, or Cour d’Honneur. All turned out from the wards
+and paraded, forming up by the light of lanterns. All but those who
+were bedridden were brought out, the maimed and cripples being led out,
+or hobbling out on their crutches, together with the survivors of those
+who had fought so gallantly at the barriers during the day, their faces
+still begrimed with powder-smoke, their clothes torn and stained,
+some without their hats, their arms in slings, or with bandages over
+recent wounds. Then the tall, spare figure of the Governor, a grim,
+hard-featured old warrior, white-haired, over seventy years of age, was
+seen emerging from his quarters, with the senior staff-officers of the
+Hospital following in rear. Serrurier harangued the pensioners briefly.
+He told them that the enemy would enter the city next day and would
+present themselves at the Invalides to enforce the giving up of the
+trophies. What did the men of the Invalides desire should be done?
+
+[Sidenote: “LET US BURN THEM HERE!”]
+
+There was a pause for a moment; a dead silence, as the old
+soldiers gazed dumbfoundedly at one another. Then one man stepped
+out to the front and spoke up for the rest. A battle-scarred old
+sergeant-pensioner of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard answered the
+Governor on behalf of his comrades, his reply, greeted as it was by
+vociferous shouts of approval on every side, voicing the unanimous wish
+of the veterans. “If they will not let us keep our banners, let us burn
+them here! We will swallow the ashes!” The order to make a bonfire of
+the trophies then and there was issued forthwith.
+
+Anything that came to hand for fuel was eagerly seized, and a great
+pile speedily made of broken-up stools and mess-tables and forms,
+hauled out from the barrack-rooms withindoors. They were stacked in
+a heap just in front of the pedestal on which it had been intended to
+erect an equestrian statue of the heroic Marshal Lannes, who died from
+his wounds at Aspern in the arms of Napoleon. Meanwhile, parties of
+men ran inside with ladders, and set to work to strip the dining-halls
+and the Chapel of the rows of flags hanging up there. They bore them
+outside, roughly bundled together in their arms; some, silently, with
+frowning, stern-set faces and set teeth; others beside themselves with
+rage, and cursing savagely aloud; others sullenly muttering oaths; not
+a few of the old fellows with tears streaming down their cheeks. They
+carried the trophies out and heaped them up into an immense funeral
+pyre. The battalion and other Eagles shared the fate of the captured
+trophies--standards, some of these, that had been borne under fire in
+the thick of triumphant battle at Austerlitz, and Jena, at Auerstadt
+and Friedland--to save them on the morrow from falling into the hands
+of those in whose defeat and humiliation they had had their part. The
+fire was lighted and the masses of tattered silk blazed up furiously.
+When the flames were at their fiercest, Marshal Serrurier stepped
+forward and with his own hand flung into the midst of the fiery mass
+the sword of Frederick the Great.
+
+For half the night the veterans stood round and watched the flames
+complete the work of destruction. They stood massed round in a densely
+packed throng of sullen, gloomy, brokenhearted men. They stayed there
+until long after midnight, gazing, in a state of dull despair, at the
+fire; while some now and again stirred up the glowing fuel and made
+the flames leap up afresh, roaring and crackling and casting a dull
+red throbbing glare over the old walls and rows of windows all round,
+and gleaming on the lofty gilded dome of the Invalides, in itself an
+intended memento of victory. On first seeing the golden domes of the
+Kremlin as he approached Moscow, Napoleon had sent orders to Paris to
+have the dome of the Invalides gilded as a memorial of his achievement
+of the goal of the campaign! Most of the veterans stood there
+throughout the greater part of that cold March night, watching until
+the fire had died down and only a great heap of smouldering cinders
+remained; all that was left of the trophies of victorious France.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TROPHIES OF TWO CENTURIES]
+
+Among the vast array of foreign trophies at the Invalides that perished
+on that night were English flags nearly two centuries old, the remains
+of the spoil of some forty-four English banners of Charles the First’s
+soldiers, triumphantly carried to Paris from the Ile de Rhé in November
+1627 and hung in Notre Dame. Others flags destroyed there, too, dated
+from the wars of the Grand Monarque; spoils won on the battlefield by
+the famous Condé and Turenne; also trophies taken from William the
+Third at Steenkirk and Landen and elsewhere; the British and Dutch
+and Danish and Bavarian ensigns won by Turenne’s great successor,
+Marshal Luxembourg, “le Tapissier de Notre Dame,” as they dubbed him
+at Versailles, for the almost innumerable trophies sent by Luxembourg
+to be hung up in the Cathedral of Paris, with State processions and Te
+Deums in the presence of the King. Other British battle-spoils, the
+trophies of France, which passed out of existence at the Invalides on
+that night were these: a flag taken at Fontenoy by the Irish Brigade;
+the regimental colours surrendered by the garrison of Minorca which
+Admiral Byng failed to rescue; those of another British garrison of
+Minorca of the time of the Great Siege of Gibraltar, when France, for
+the second time, wrested the island from England; four British and
+Hessian regimental flags surrendered to Washington at Yorktown and sent
+by Congress as a gift to the King of France; flags taken by the French
+from British West India garrisons in the same war; besides British
+naval ensigns also taken during the American War, with other British
+ship-flags, some of which indeed dated from the earlier battle times
+of Duguay Trouin and Jean Bart. Destroyed at the Invalides also on
+that Wednesday night was a British naval ensign from Trafalgar. It had
+been hoisted on board one of Nelson’s prizes, the _Algéciras_. In the
+storm after the battle the ship was in imminent peril of wreck, and the
+French prisoners on board were liberated in order to help to save her.
+They used their freedom to overpower the small British prize-crew and
+carried the vessel off into Cadiz, whence the British ensign, hoisted
+originally in triumph over the French tricolor during the battle of two
+days before, on the _Algéciras_ being captured, was sent as a trophy to
+Paris. There were also destroyed at the Invalides at the same time the
+ensign of Lord Cochrane’s famous brig-of-war, the _Speedy_, captured in
+the Mediterranean in 1801, and those of three British line-of-battle
+ships, the _Berwick_, the _Swiftsure_, and the _Hannibal_, taken within
+the previous twenty years.
+
+[Sidenote: SPOILS TAKEN IN NAVAL FIGHTS]
+
+Most of the trophies won by Napoleon and the Grand Army all over
+Europe, and by the Armies of the Republic and Consulate before
+that, perished in the holocaust: the spoils of Valmy and Fleurus
+and Jemmapes; of Hohenlinden; of Dego and Mondovi; of Rivoli and
+Montenotte; of Castiglione, Lodi, and Arcola; of Zurich and Marengo,
+and other victories. On that night, too, passed out of existence the
+famous flag of the Army of Italy presented by Napoleon, and bearing
+inscribed on it the names of eighty triumphs on the battlefield and the
+detailed record of the taking of 150,000 prisoners, 170 standards, 550
+siege-guns, and 600 pieces of field artillery; the Horse-tail banners
+of the Mamelukes, taken by Napoleon at the battle of the Pyramids; the
+historic standard of the Knights of St. John, won in hand-to-hand fight
+outside the main gate of Valetta. Most of the 340 Prussian standards
+Napoleon sent to Paris after the Jena campaign, together with the sword
+and Black Eagle sash of Frederick the Great, as well as the recovered
+French trophies of the Seven Years’ War, originally won by Frederick at
+Rosbach, the standards of Frederick the Great’s Guards, and Austrian
+spoils taken by the Prussians at Leuthen, Kolin, and Hohenfriedburg,
+all of which had been carried off to Paris by Napoleon--these were
+among the war-treasures destroyed at the Invalides on that night. With
+them went into the flames the Grand Army’s Russian trophies from Eylau
+and Friedland, the Austrian trophies from Eckmühl and Wagram, besides
+many Spanish and Portuguese trophies taken before Wellington landed in
+the Peninsula to turn the tide of war.
+
+[Sidenote: AFTER DUPONT’S SURRENDER]
+
+One French Eagle which perished on that night was the survivor of a
+disaster: Dupont’s surrender at Bailen in Andalusia in 1808,[36] at
+the outset of the Spanish insurrection; that cruel humiliation for
+the arms of France, the news of which came on Europe with all the
+startling effect of a thunderclap, and drove Napoleon nearly frantic
+in his furious indignation. It had been one of three Eagles taken by
+the Spaniards, that of the 24me Légère, and had been recovered by the
+daring of an officer of the regiment, one of the prisoners, Captain
+Lanusse. Confined in a prison-hulk at Cadiz, he escaped to shore
+one night, managed to find out where his regiment’s flag was kept,
+displayed as a Spanish trophy, got hold of it, and then made his way
+outside the city into the lines of the besieging French army. There
+he presented the Eagle to Marshal Soult, who forwarded it direct to
+Napoleon. Lanusse, as his reward, was promoted a _chef de bataillon_ of
+the 8th of the Line, and fell to the bayonet of a British soldier of
+the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at Barrosa. The recovered Eagle Napoleon
+sent to the Invalides.
+
+By morning all that remained of the proud trophies of France at the
+Invalides was a heap of grey ashes, fragments of charred flag-poles,
+and scraps of partly molten metal. The _débris_ was raked up at
+daylight, and shovelled into the artillery fourgon of the previous
+afternoon, which had been standing all night outside the main gate
+of the Invalides. The artillery wagon drove off with it to the Seine
+near by and emptied the heap into the river. That was the end of the
+night’s destruction.
+
+[Sidenote: ALL THAT WAS DREDGED UP]
+
+Some portion of the _débris_ was recovered from the Seine a year
+afterwards, and is preserved in the Chapel of the Invalides now. In
+June 1815 a workman, doing some repairs by the riverside, discovered a
+portion of a flag under water, and on hearing of that, two patriotic
+young Frenchmen, an engineer and a journalist, privately set to work
+soon afterwards to see if they could fish up anything that might
+be worth preserving. At the time the Allies were in possession of
+Paris, during the second occupation, after Waterloo, and the two
+young men had to proceed cautiously. They were successful in the end
+in recovering portions of 183 trophies, metal spear-head ornaments,
+from ensign-staves mostly. Seventy-eight were later identified as of
+Austrian origin; one as part of a British flag; two as having belonged
+to Russian standards; various fragments as the remains of thirty-nine
+Prussian standards; four from Spanish flags with Bourbon fleurs-de-lis;
+and two fragments of Turkish standards from Egypt. The remainder of the
+salvage it was impossible to identify.
+
+That the great sacrifice had not been made in vain, was speedily
+apparent. In the course of the morning after the bonfire, a little
+before noon on Thursday, March 31, within two hours of the entry into
+Paris of the vanguard of the Allied armies, a Russian aide de camp
+presented himself at the Invalides, and, in the name of the Allied
+sovereigns, demanded a statement of the trophies kept there. The
+officer came up on horseback, accompanied by a mounted man of the
+National Guard, and an armed escort of Russian dragoons. The main
+gate was open as usual, and the Russian officer rode through without
+taking notice of the gate-sentry’s challenge. He was only stopped
+by a rush of the pensioners’ day-guard, called out by the sentry’s
+shout of alarm--“Aux armes!” The guard turned out and faced the aide
+de camp with lowered halberds. The Russian colonel protested, but
+the officer on duty refused to let him pass without orders from his
+own chief, and General Darnaud, the Lieutenant-Governor, was sent
+for. That officer came, and the Russian dismounted and explained his
+mission. He had orders, he said, to “take cognisance” of the trophies
+of the Invalides. General Darnaud replied bluntly: “Very good, I will
+permit you to visit the Hôtel. Come with me!” The general added: “As
+to the trophies, sir, we have dealt with them according to the laws of
+war!” “On en avait agi suivant les lois de guerre!” were his words.
+The Russian did not seem to grasp the general’s meaning, and stood
+still for a moment, staring blankly at him. On that, Madame Darnaud,
+the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife, who had followed into the courtyard
+immediately after her husband, interposed. She addressed the officer,
+speaking volubly and angrily, but only to draw down on herself from the
+Russian the uncivil rejoinder that he had not come there to talk to a
+woman! After that, the general, accompanied by some of the men of the
+main guard with shouldered halberds, formally conducted the officer
+inside the Invalides, the party taking their way along the colonnade
+round the Court of Honour, in the midst of which could be seen the wide
+burnt-out space where the fire had been, the pungent smell of the fumes
+from which still hung about the place, and so into the Chapel of St.
+Louis. There the scene that met the Russian aide de camp’s eyes seemed
+to stagger him: bare blank walls, the gallery stripped and defaced;
+with empty and broken metal sockets here and there to show where the
+flags had been fastened up. The interior had been entirely cleared from
+end to end along the sides. It was absolutely unrecognisable to any who
+had seen it before. The Russian officer, who had visited the Invalides
+six or seven years previously, after Tilsit, could only gaze round
+dumbly, utterly taken aback. He muttered something, but did not speak
+aloud. Then, glaring round savagely into the eyes of those about him,
+he turned away abruptly, and was conducted to the Outer Court, where he
+remounted his horse, and rode off hastily in the direction whence he
+had come.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WALLS STRIPPED AND BARE]
+
+All Napoleon’s trophies, however, did not perish at the Invalides.
+Some of the Grand Army’s captured flags, as it so chanced, escaped
+destruction on that night, and are at the Invalides now. They are
+in the Chapel and in the Salle Turenne, besides half a hundred in
+the Crypt, grouped round Napoleon’s tomb. The forty-five Austrian
+flags taken at Ulm are beside Napoleon’s tomb, with nine other flags.
+Presented by the Emperor to the Senate, as has been told, the Ulm
+trophies, during the night of March 30, were hastily taken down from
+where they had been hung in the Grand Salon for the past nine years,
+and hidden in a vault below. They made a second public appearance on
+the occasion of Napoleon’s funeral at the Invalides in 1840, when they
+were placed at the head of the coffin. They have ever since been kept
+beside the tomb.
+
+The Austerlitz trophies met another fate. Kept at Notre Dame, they
+disappeared mysteriously from there in the early morning of the day of
+the entry of the Allies into Paris. At three in the morning of March
+31 an urgent message from the Prefect of the Seine was delivered at
+Notre Dame, calling on the Cathedral authorities to take down and
+conceal the Austerlitz trophies at once. The Chapter met hastily in the
+Archbishop’s room, and the flags were all down within half an hour.
+They have never been seen since, nor was their fate ever accounted for.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW FIFTY-ONE FLAGS WERE SAVED]
+
+At the Luxembourg Palace were displayed 110 trophies, the spoils
+of the Eagles, won from all the nations of Europe and presented to
+the _Corps Legislatif_ by Napoleon. They were safely removed on the
+night of March 30, and were hidden securely. Brought out and set up
+again a year later, on Napoleon’s return from Elba, the authorities
+forgot about hiding them again in the confusion after Waterloo. As the
+result more than half of them are now in Berlin. Blücher sent a party
+of staff officers to seize the entire collection, but a sharp-witted
+functionary hoodwinked the Prussians on their arrival. They went back
+to get written orders, and before they returned, as many as possible
+of the trophies had been pulled down and got out of the way. One of
+the attendants managed the affair on his own initiative, a hall-porter
+named Mathieu. He was able to save and hide as many as fifty-one of the
+flags, and they have since been forwarded to the Invalides. The other
+fifty-nine trophies the Prussians seized and carried off. Two Austrian
+standards taken by Napoleon at Marengo escaped destruction by having
+been previously lent from the Invalides to an artist, Charles Vernet,
+for a battle-picture he had been commissioned to paint for Napoleon.
+They were in Vernet’s studio in March 1814. His son, Horace Vernet,
+returned them in later days to the Invalides, where they now are.
+
+In addition, it would seem, at least a moiety of the Invalides trophies
+were kept back at the last moment by some of the veterans themselves.
+Several of the old soldiers, it would appear, after stripping down the
+flags from the walls, instead of carrying all out into the courtyard to
+the bonfire, retained and hid a few of them on their own account, to
+smuggle them outside afterwards and keep them in concealment.[37]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE EAGLES OF THE LAST ARMY
+
+
+The Eagles came back to France with the return of Napoleon from Elba;
+to lead the last Army to the campaign of the Hundred Days.
+
+They “flew from steeple to steeple across France,” in Napoleon’s
+expressive phrase, “from the shores of Fréjus until they alighted
+on the towers of Notre Dame.” The enthusiasm that greeted their
+reappearance spread like wild-fire; it blazed up like an exploding
+magazine. The rapturous acclamation and enthusiasm with which the
+Eagles were welcomed back was the measure of the prevailing discontent
+and resentment among the soldiers at the harsh and unworthy treatment
+they had received during the ten months of the restored _régime_.
+
+The Army had come off badly by its change of masters. The Bourbons had
+done all in their power to alienate its regard; as much through malice
+in not a few cases, as through downright stupidity.
+
+“Of all the institutions of France the most thoroughly national and
+the most thoroughly democratic was the Army; it was accordingly
+against the Army that the _noblesse_ directed its first efforts.
+Financial difficulties made a large reduction in the forces necessary.
+Fourteen thousand officers and sergeants were accordingly dismissed
+on half-pay; but no sooner had this measure of economy been effected
+than a multitude of emigrants who had served against the Republic in
+the army of the Prince of Condé or in La Vendée were rewarded with all
+degrees of military rank.... The tricolor, under which every battle of
+France had been fought from Jemmapes to Montmartre, was superseded by
+the white flag of the House of Bourbon, under which no living soldier
+had marched to victory.... The Imperial Guard was removed from service
+at the Palace, and the so-called Military Household of the old Bourbon
+monarchy revived, with the privileges and the insignia belonging to the
+period before 1775.”
+
+The abolition of the Eagles was the preliminary step of all. A
+justifiable measure, no doubt, from a political point of view, it
+touched to the quick the military instinct of the nation. And on that
+followed the abolition of the national tricolor in favour of the old
+Bourbon white flag.
+
+[Sidenote: EVERY ONE TO BE DESTROYED]
+
+Within three weeks of the Farewell of Fontainebleau the Eagles of the
+Army, with the tricolor standards, were officially proscribed; the
+order went forth to send them to Paris forthwith for destruction in
+the furnaces of the artillery dépôt at Vincennes. On May 12 it was
+notified that the white Bourbon flag was again to be the standard of
+the Army, with a brass fleur-de-lis at the head of the colour-staff in
+place of the Eagle.
+
+Every regiment was required to send its Eagle to the Ministry of War
+in Paris on receipt of the order. No allowances or exceptions were
+made; although in several instances officers urgently petitioned to be
+allowed to retain their Eagles with the corps, if only as mementoes
+of feats of arms achieved by the regiments in battle. Every request
+was rejected, whatever the circumstances. There were reasons of State
+policy no doubt, as has been said, against the general retention as
+regimental standards of military insignia so intimately associated
+with Napoleon; but in certain instances, at least, indulgence might
+reasonably have been extended to the applications. There were personal
+and romantic associations connected with some of the Eagles, specially
+endearing them to the soldiers, for which privilege might well have
+been accorded. One very hard case may be cited as typical of others:
+that of the Eagle of the 25th of the Line.
+
+The Eagle of the 25th had been carried under fire in some twenty
+battles and all through the Moscow campaign; and had notable
+battle-scars to show for its distinguished services. One leg and one
+wing of the Eagle had been shot away in action, and there were five
+bullet-holes in its metal body. Its maimed appearance, indeed, had
+attracted Napoleon’s attention at a review, and he had stopped while
+riding past the regiment and taken the Eagle into his hands, examining
+it with extreme interest and putting his fingers into the bullet-holes,
+finally returning it to the Porte-Aigle with a deep bow of respect. The
+regiment almost worshipped their Eagle on its own account, for what
+it had gone through; but it had further undergone yet more surprising
+adventures. The 25th had been in the garrison of Dresden in 1813 when
+Marshal St. Cyr had to capitulate to the Austrians. On the night
+before the surrender the Eagle-staff was broken up and burned, and the
+few strips of ragged silk that remained of the shot-torn regimental
+tricolor flag were tied under an officer’s uniform for secret
+conveyance out of the city. The shattered Eagle broke in two while
+being removed from its staff, and its two fragments were concealed
+under the petticoats of two vivandières who were to convey it in that
+manner to the regimental dépôt in France. Under the capitulation the
+garrison was granted the honours of war and a safe-conduct back to
+France. The terms, however, were annulled by the Allied Sovereigns then
+advancing, after Leipsic, to invade France, and in the outcome all the
+regiments, after they had started for France, were made prisoners and
+marched away to be interned in Hungary. The major of the 25th got back
+the two fragments of the Eagle, stowed them away under his uniform, and
+kept them about him by day and night for five months; until finally,
+on his release after Napoleon’s abdication, he brought the Eagle back
+across the Rhine, “wrapped up like contraband.”
+
+[Sidenote: “SEND IT TO PARIS FORTHWITH!”]
+
+On the 25th receiving the order to send in its Eagle for destruction,
+he wrote personally to the Minister of War--General Dupont, of Bailen
+notoriety, as has been said--who had never forgiven Napoleon’s harsh
+usage of him, and now took every opportunity of paying back old
+scores on the heads of his former comrades in arms. The major wrote
+setting forth in detail the story of the regimental Eagle, relating
+its exceptionally interesting career and its battle damages, also how
+he had preserved it after Dresden, and implored the War Minister, in
+the name of the regiment, that they might retain the two fragments to
+be kept in the regimental “Salle d’Honneur” as an honoured relic. The
+reply was a peremptorily worded command to send the Eagle to Paris
+forthwith for destruction with the other Eagles of the Army. The
+major, in the circumstances, considered himself compelled to comply.
+He summoned the officers to his quarters, where they “paid their last
+adieux to the object of veneration, and then, in their presence, the
+Eagle fragments were packed in a box, and despatched to the Ministry of
+War.”
+
+The story, with others to the same effect, went the round of every
+barrack-room in France, and wherever it was told, there were angry
+murmurings and increased discontent.
+
+By no means all the Eagles of the Army, it would appear, were given
+up to the authorities in Paris. Not a few colonels flatly refused
+to comply with Dupont’s order, taking the risk of prosecution or of
+being turned out of the service summarily--a certainty in any event
+under the new _régime_, as the majority of the senior regimental
+officers anticipated, and as actually came to pass. General Petit of
+the Grenadiers of the Old Guard, as has already been said, refused to
+give up that famous Eagle, and concealed it successfully; and not a
+few other officers did the same with the Eagles of their corps. Others
+destroyed their regimental Eagles and either burned the silken tricolor
+flags, or cut them up; dividing the ashes or fragments among their
+comrades.
+
+Their Eagles taken away, it was next made known to the Army, that the
+“battle honours” and war distinctions of the various corps, won under
+Napoleon, would not appear on the new regimental flags when issued.
+“Austerlitz,” “Jena,” “Friedland,” and the other names of pride to the
+Grand Army, were henceforward to be erased from military recognition.
+The new flags, when publicly distributed in September 1814, showed
+each a blank white field, with on it only an oval shield, bearing the
+three fleurs-de-lis, the Royal Bourbon cognisance, and the name of the
+corps--its new name, revived from Army Lists of the Old Monarchy, a
+name long since forgotten and totally unfamiliar.
+
+[Sidenote: NO MORE REGIMENTAL NUMBERS]
+
+The regimental numbers of the Grand Army, ennobled by glorious
+campaigns, immortalised by their associations of victory and
+brilliant feats of arms, instinct with a renown acquired on a hundred
+battlefields all over Europe, were at the same time done away with by
+a stroke of the War Minister’s pen. That proved the most unpopular
+measure of all; the cruellest of blows to the _esprit de corps_ and
+pride of the former soldiers of Napoleon. It was felt as a gratuitous
+insult; it was perhaps the most deeply resented injury of all. In
+future, in place of their treasured regimental numbers, the various
+corps of the Army, horse and foot, were to be known by departmental or
+territorial names--meaningless to nine soldiers out of ten, and without
+traditions--or else by the names of royal princes and princesses, and
+titled personages, remembered only, some of them, as having fled on
+the battlefield before the national armies. Bercheney and Chamborant
+Hussars, Orléans Dragoons and Chasseurs, Regiments d’Artois, de Berri,
+d’Armagnac, d’Angoulême, de Monsieur, d’Anjou, and so forth--what
+traditions had designations such as these to compare with, to mention
+in the same breath with, the traditions immortally associated with
+the numbers, familiar as household words wherever French soldiers met
+together, of the dragoon and chasseur regiments which Murat had led
+at Austerlitz, of the dashing hussars of Lassalle, of the cuirassiers
+whose resistless onset had swept the field at Jena, of the horsemen
+at the sight of whose sabres before their gates Prussian fortresses
+had surrendered at discretion? It came with a sense of personal
+degradation, as a sort of desecration on the men of regiments like the
+75th of the Line, or the 32nd, the 9th Light Infantry or the 84th, or
+the 35th, or “Le terrible 57me”--to be labelled and hear themselves
+officially addressed on parade as “Beauvoisis” or “Auxerre” or
+“Nivernais,” by the name of some prosaic locality, or the style of some
+ancient aristocrat, their titular colonel.[38]
+
+[Sidenote: AT THE HEAD OF THE “ELBA GUARD”]
+
+Napoleon announced the return of the Eagle in his first address to
+the Army, sent off on his landing to be distributed broadcast among
+the soldiers. “Come and range yourselves under the banners of your
+chief.... Victory shall march at the _pas de charge_: the Eagle with
+the national colours shall fly from steeple to steeple to the towers of
+Notre Dame!”
+
+The first of the regimental Eagles to make its appearance in France
+accompanied Napoleon from Elba and landed with him. It was the Eagle
+of the six hundred veterans of the Old Guard who, as the “Elba Guard,”
+had volunteered to share Napoleon’s exile, and had formed his personal
+escort. It figured in the historic scene at Grenoble a week after
+the landing, where Napoleon, on meeting the first soldiers sent to
+arrest his advance, by the magic of his presence and the sight of
+the Eagle borne behind him, so dramatically won over to his side the
+former 5th of the Line, the first regiment of the Army to throw in
+its lot with Napoleon after Elba. The Eagle that had its part on the
+historic occasion--with its silken tricolor flag, embroidered with
+silver wreaths and scrollery, and golden bees, crowns and Imperial
+cyphers, and inscribed “L’Empereur Napoléon à la Garde Nationale de
+l’Ile Elba”--is now in private possession in England. It fell by some
+means into the hands of a Prussian soldier at the occupation of Paris
+after Waterloo and was sold a few weeks later to a visitor to Paris. In
+the dramatic scene of the meeting of Napoleon with the 5th of the Line,
+General Cambronne, Commander of the Elba Guard, bore the Eagle a few
+paces behind Napoleon and held it up appealingly to the regiment.
+
+[Sidenote: “LET ANY WHO WISHES--FIRE!”]
+
+The 5th of the Line, says one story, vouched for by an eye-witness,
+was marching out to block a narrow gorge through which ran the road
+Napoleon was known to be taking. At some little way off, his party was
+seen approaching, he himself being readily recognised by his small
+cocked hat and _redingote gris_. Immediately the men were formed up
+across the road, and, as Napoleon came nearer, they were ordered to
+make ready and present. They did so: the muskets came up and were
+levelled. Then came a pause; dead silence; an interval of breathless
+suspense. Napoleon’s own action decided the issue. Stepping rapidly
+forward, opening and throwing back his great-coat as he did so, he
+called aloud to the regiment: “Soldats, voilà votre Empereur! Que celui
+d’entre vous qui voudra le tuer, faire feu sur lui!” (“Soldiers, here
+is your Emperor! Let any one who wishes to kill him fire on him!”) A
+Royalist officer hastily called out the order: “Le voilà! donnez feu,
+soldats!” But not a shot came. The next instant, with shouts of “Vive
+l’Empereur!” the soldiers lowered their muskets, broke their ranks,
+and rushed forward to surround Napoleon and welcome him in a frenzy of
+enthusiasm.
+
+According to another story, this is what took place. Before the word
+“Fire!” could be given, Napoleon had stepped forward, close up to the
+muzzles of the levelled muskets. With a smile on his face he began in
+his usual colloquial, familiar way when talking to the men: “Well,
+soldiers of the 5th, how are you all? I am come to see you again: is
+there any one of you who wishes to kill me?” Shouts came in reply of
+“No, no, Sire! certainly not!” The muskets went down; Napoleon passed
+along the ranks, inspecting the men just as of old; after that the
+regiment faced about, took the lead of the party, and, with Napoleon in
+the middle and the “Elba Guard” bringing up the rear, all marched on
+towards Grenoble.
+
+[Sidenote: MARSHAL NEY’S DILEMMA]
+
+There, meanwhile, events had been moving rapidly. The commandant of
+the garrison was an _émigré_ officer, but most of the troops had been
+won over for Napoleon by Colonel Labédoyère, at the head of the 7th
+of the Line. The commandant ordered the gates to be closed, which was
+done; also the cannon on the ramparts to be loaded. That order was duly
+obeyed; “but the men rammed home the cannon-balls first, before putting
+in the powder, so that the guns were useless.” Labédoyère marched out
+with his regiment to meet Napoleon, the band playing, “and carrying
+the Eagle of the regiment, which had been concealed and preserved.”
+They met Napoleon a short distance from Grenoble and, with the 5th, led
+the way in, arriving after dark. “On Napoleon’s approach, the populace
+thronged the ramparts with torches; the gates were burst open; Napoleon
+was borne through the town in triumph by a wild and intermingled crowd
+of soldiers and workpeople.”[39]
+
+Napoleon entered Paris on the night of March 20. The Eagles made their
+first appearance in the capital next day. They had been officially
+restored as the standards of the Army by an Imperial decree issued on
+March 13 from Lyons.
+
+[Sidenote: AT THE FIRST REVIEW IN PARIS]
+
+Paris saw them again first at the review of the garrison of the capital
+which Napoleon held within twenty-four hours of his arrival; on the
+Place du Carrousel, in front of the Tuileries. There too the Imperial
+Guard, reconstituted that same morning, made their public reappearance.
+In the midst of the brilliant scene, as Napoleon was ending the address
+of personal thanks for their loyalty that he made to the assembled
+troops in dramatic style, suddenly General Cambronne marched on to
+the parade at the head of the Elba Six Hundred, with drums beating
+and escorting the former Eagles of the Guard. Drawing up in line
+ceremoniously, the “Elba Guard” halted before Napoleon, saluting and
+dipping the Eagles forward. A frantic roar of enthusiastic cheering
+greeted the salute of the Eagles.
+
+Napoleon took instant advantage of the first pause as the cheering
+subsided. Pointing to the veterans just arrived, and standing with
+the Eagles ranged in front of them, held on high at arm’s-length by
+their bearers, he again addressed the assembled troops. “They bring
+back to you the Eagles which are to serve as your rallying-point.
+In giving them to the Guard, I give them to the whole Army. Treason
+and misfortune have cast over them a veil of mourning; but they now
+reappear resplendent in their old glory. Swear to me, soldiers, that
+these Eagles shall always be found where the welfare of the nation
+calls them, and those who would invade our land again shall not be able
+to endure their glance!” “We swear it! We swear it!” was the answer
+that came back amid tumultuous shouts from every side.
+
+[Sidenote: ONCE MORE THE FIELD OF MARS]
+
+The Eagles restored by proclamation as the standards of the Army, and
+the regiments reconstituted by their old numbers, to the unbounded
+gratification of the soldiers everywhere, another Imperial proclamation
+announced that Napoleon would once again personally distribute new
+Eagles to the regiments. The ceremony of the Field of Mars of ten
+years before would be repeated. The Emperor, with his own hand, would
+present each Eagle to a regimental deputation, which would specially
+attend in Paris to receive it. To give the utmost possible _éclat_ also
+to the proceedings on the occasion, just as the former presentation
+of the Eagles had been made an integral feature of the Coronation
+celebration, so now the forthcoming distribution would take place at
+the same time that Napoleon renewed his Imperial oath of fidelity to
+the Constitution, as reshaped by the “_Acte Additionel_,” which had
+been drafted to comply with the political exigencies of the moment.
+
+The date provisionally fixed was towards the end of May. By that
+time the returns of the _Plébiscite_ voting, to authorise the
+re-establishment of the Empire, would be known. The historic event
+takes its name of the “_Champ de Mai_” from the date proposed for it,
+although, in actual fact, the ceremony took place on June 1. The place
+appointed was where the former distribution of the Eagles had been
+made, the Field of Mars, the wide open space in front of the Military
+School, and the display was to be on no less grandiose scale than its
+predecessor.
+
+Immense wooden stands were erected all round the Field of Mars, with
+tiers of benches, to seat, it was calculated, as many as two hundred
+thousand people. In front of the Military School was set up an Imperial
+throne, under a canopy of crimson silk, and elevated on a gorgeously
+decorated platform. Napoleon was to take his new Imperial oath from
+the throne, and thereupon formally attach his signature to the “_Acte
+Additionel_.” There was to be a religious service also, and for that an
+altar was erected at one side of the throne, raised on steps and draped
+in red damask, picked out with gold. The balconies and stands all
+round were draped and hung with tricolor flags, festooned amid gilded
+Eagles, and heraldic insignia, and emblematic figures meant to typify
+the prosperity and glory awaiting France under the returned Imperial
+_régime_. As on the previous occasion, all the celebrities of France
+were invited, and had their allotted places on the stands nearest the
+throne. As before, too, the central arena was packed with a dense array
+of troops; the deputations called up to receive the Eagles, the massed
+battalions of the Imperial Guard, and detachments of all the regiments
+of the garrison of Paris. It was a radiantly fine summer’s day, and the
+display offered a spectacle of surpassing brilliance. Says one of the
+officers: “The sun flashing on 50,000 bayonets seemed to make the vast
+space sparkle!”
+
+A hundred cannon fired from the Esplanade of the Invalides ushered in
+the day of the “_Champ de Mai_.” Again, at ten o’clock, the artillery
+thundered forth as Napoleon quitted the Tuileries in State to take
+his way to the Field of Mars, “amid prodigious crowds of spectators
+applauding enthusiastically,” along the Champs Elysées and across the
+Pont d’Jéna.
+
+[Sidenote: NINE MARSHALS TAKE PART]
+
+Nine of the marshals who had cast in their lot with the returned
+Emperor rode on either side of Napoleon’s coach: Davout, Minister of
+War, who had not yet sworn allegiance to the Bourbons; Soult, the newly
+appointed Chief of the Staff of the Army; Serrurier, Governor of the
+Invalides; Brune and Jourdan; Moncey and Mortier; Suchet and Grouchy.
+Ney was absent; Napoleon had refused to see him. Ney’s widely reported
+speech to Louis XVIII., that he would “bring the bandit to Paris in
+an iron cage,” had not been forgiven. Murat was in disgrace for his
+recent blundering move in Northern Italy, which had vitally affected
+Napoleon’s plans. His desertion during the closing campaign, when
+Napoleon was at bay after Leipsic, moreover, was beyond condonation.
+Of others who had been at Napoleon’s side on the Field of Mars ten
+years before, Lefebvre and Masséna professed to be too old and infirm
+for service in the field, although Masséna was still nominally on
+the Active List, and had been in command for King Louis at Toulon.
+He was due in Paris to meet Napoleon, but his fidelity was more than
+doubtful: “gorged with wealth, Masséna thought only of preserving it.”
+Augereau kept in the background, Napoleon refusing to have more to do
+with him. Berthier, on that very morning, was lying dead at Bamberg
+in Bavaria; whether victim of an accident or suicide has never been
+made clear. Lannes and Bessières were in their graves, fallen on the
+field of battle. Bernadotte, King of Sweden, was actively on the side
+of the enemy. Marmont, Oudinot, Macdonald, and Victor, marshals of
+later creation, had left France in company with the Bourbon princes.
+Old Kellerman and Perignon, “Honorary Marshals” of 1804, had not come
+forward again, remaining in seclusion; nor had St. Cyr, “the man of
+ice,” another marshal since the Field of Mars, who was staying at home
+with studied indifference, “occupying himself on his estate with his
+hay crops and playing the fiddle.”
+
+[Sidenote: THE “MAN OF SEDAN” WAS THERE]
+
+Napoleon was accompanied in the State coach by three of his
+brothers--Lucien, Joseph, and Jerome. This time there was of course
+no Empress present. Josephine was dead: Marie Louise was holding
+back elsewhere. None of the Bonaparte princesses appeared in the
+procession. The only one attending the “_Champ de Mai_” came as a
+spectator: Hortense Beauharnais, the daughter of Josephine and wife
+of Louis Bonaparte. She had gone on in advance to the Military School
+and was seated among the exalted personages awaiting Napoleon there;
+accompanied by her two boys (one the future Third Napoleon, the “Man of
+Sedan”). She seemed most interested, as we are told, in the sketch-book
+she brought with her to draw a picture of the scene.
+
+Napoleon alighted in the First Court of the Military School, being
+acclaimed on all sides as he made his appearance with vociferous shouts
+of “Vive l’Empereur!” Preceded by palace grandees and Court officials,
+who had alighted from their carriages in advance and formed up to
+receive him, he entered the building and passed on through to take his
+seat on the throne. “He had the air of being in pain and anxious,”
+describes an onlooker. “He descended slowly from his carriage while a
+hundred drums beat ‘_Au Champ_.’ Then, advancing quickly, returning
+the salutes of the assemblage at either side with bows, he proceeded
+to the throne, and sat down, gazing round at the people in their dense
+masses as he did so. Jerome and Joseph seated themselves on the right;
+Lucien on the left; all three clad in white satin with black velvet
+hats with white plumes. Napoleon himself had on his Imperial mantle of
+ermine and purple velvet embroidered with golden bees.”
+
+For a time the thundering cannon salutes and acclamations of the people
+that hailed Napoleon’s appearance on the daïs were deafening. Bowing
+repeatedly on every side, he took his seat on the throne, while all
+present stood and remained uncovered. The guns then ceased, the music
+of the bands and the drummings and trumpetings of the battalions died
+away into silence. On that the ceremony of the day opened with the
+celebration of High Mass by the Archbishop of Tours.
+
+The religious portion of the pageant, we are told, “seemed to arouse no
+interest in Napoleon. His opera-glass wandered all the time over the
+immense multitude before him.” His attention was not recalled until
+the Mass was over, when the delegates from the Electoral College,
+marshalled by the Master of the Ceremonies, ascended the platform, and
+ranged themselves before the throne. A Deputy stepped forward, and
+after deep obeisance, in a loud resonant voice read an address teeming
+with sentiments of patriotic attachment and expressing inviolable
+fidelity towards the Emperor personally. Napoleon seemed to listen with
+interest, “marking his approbation with nods and smiles.” The Deputy
+ceased speaking amidst rapturous applause, and then Arch-Chancellor
+Cambacérès, resplendent in a gorgeous orange-yellow robe, stood forward
+in front of Napoleon to notify officially the popular acceptance of the
+new national Constitution. He declared the total of the votes given in
+the _Plébiscite_ to show a clear million in favour of the restoration
+of the Empire. There was a flourish of trumpets, and forthwith the
+chief herald proclaimed that the “Additional Act to the Constitution of
+the Empire” had been agreed to by the French people.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON SIGNS THE ACT]
+
+Again from all round thundered out an artillery salute, and the whole
+assembly rose to their feet and cheered. A small gilded table was
+brought forward and placed before Napoleon, who, the Arch-Chancellor
+holding the parchment open, and Joseph Bonaparte presenting the pen,
+publicly ratified the Act with his formal signature. The air resounded
+once more with the cannon firing and noisy acclamations on all sides.
+
+Napoleon rose, when at length the cheering ceased, to address the
+assembly with one of his most impassioned dramatic harangues. “Emperor,
+Consul, Soldier, I hold everything from the people! In prosperity and
+in adversity; in the field, in the council; in power, in exile, France
+has been the sole and constant object of my thoughts and actions!” So
+he began. He closed in the same vein: “Frenchmen! my will is that of my
+people; my rights are theirs; my honour, my glory, my happiness, can
+never be separated from the honour, glory, and happiness of France!”
+
+Again came the outburst of rapturous applause. It subsided, and the
+Archbishop of Bourges, as Grand Almoner of the Empire, came forward.
+Kneeling before Napoleon he presented the Book of the Gospels, on
+which Napoleon solemnly took the Imperial Oath to observe the new
+Constitution. There only remained for Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès and
+the principal officers of State to take their oaths of allegiance to
+the Constitution and the Emperor, and after that a solemn Te Deum
+closed the political ceremony.
+
+It was now the turn of the Eagles and the Army. The civilian personages
+withdrew from the steps of the throne; the electoral deputations fell
+back; leaving a clear open space in front. Immediately, as if by magic,
+the Eagles suddenly appeared; long rows of them flashing and glittering
+in the brilliant sunshine. They were brought forward in procession,
+advancing in massed rows “resplendent and dazzling like gold.” Carnot,
+Minister of the Interior, the “Organiser of Victory” of the Armies of
+the Revolution, headed the procession, “clad in a Spanish white dress
+of great magnificence,” carrying the First Eagle of the National Guard
+of Paris. Next him came Marshal Davout, Minister of War, carrying
+the Eagle of the 1st Regiment of the Line, and then Admiral Decrès,
+Minister of Marine (as representing the French Navy), carrying the
+Eagle of Napoleon’s 1st Regiment of Marines. General Count Friant (he
+fell at Waterloo), as Colonel-in-Chief, bore the Eagle of the Imperial
+Guard. Other officers of exalted rank bore other Eagles.
+
+[Sidenote: SPRINGING FORWARD TO MEET THEM]
+
+Napoleon’s demeanour, hitherto, for most of the time, formal and
+apathetic, altered instantaneously at the appearance of the Eagles. “He
+sprang from the throne, and, casting aside his purple mantle, rushed
+forward to meet his Eagles”; amid a sudden hush that seemed to fall
+over the whole assembly at the sight. Then the momentary silence was
+broken. An enthusiastic shout went up as the Emperor, pressing forward
+impetuously, as though electrified with sudden energy, took up his
+station immediately in front of the array of soldiers, the _élite_ of
+the veterans of the old Grand Army left alive, as they stood there
+formed up in an immense phalanx. To the sound of martial music the
+regimental deputations forthwith moved up and advanced to pass before
+him. Napoleon, with a gesture of deep reverence, took each Eagle into
+his own hands from the officer who had been carrying it, and then
+delivered it with stately formality to its future regimental bearer as
+the deputations in turn filed past him.
+
+He had a word for the men of every corps as each set of ten officers
+and men drew up before him. To some he said, glancing at the number of
+their regiment on their shakos, “I remember you well. You are my old
+companions of Italy!” or, “You are my comrades of Egypt!” and so on.
+Others he reminded of past days of distinction. “You were with me at
+Arcola!” he said to one group, or “at Rivoli!” “at Austerlitz!” “at
+Friedland!” to others, as might be--his words, we are told, “inspiring
+the men with deep emotion.” For each of the National Guard deputations
+he had also their little speech. To one detachment for instance, as it
+came up, he said: “You are my old companions from the Rhine; you have
+been the foremost, the most courageous, the most unfortunate in our
+disasters; but I remember all!”
+
+The last Eagle presented, Napoleon called on the soldiers to take
+the Army Oath of fidelity to the Standard, using his customary Eagle
+oration formula.
+
+“Soldiers of the National Guard of the Empire!” he began, “Soldiers of
+my Imperial Guard! Soldiers of the Line on land and sea! I entrust to
+your hands the Imperial Eagle! You swear here to defend it at the cost
+of your life’s blood against the enemies of the nation. You swear that
+it will always be your guiding sign, your rallying point!”
+
+[Sidenote: AMIDST A TUMULT OF ENTHUSIASM]
+
+Some of those nearest interrupted Napoleon with shouts of “We swear!”
+He went on: “You swear never to acknowledge any other standard!” The
+shouts of “We swear!” again broke in vociferously.
+
+Napoleon again went on: “You, Soldiers of the National Guard of Paris,
+swear never to permit the foreigner to desecrate again the capital of
+the Great Nation! To your courage I commit it!” Cries of “We swear!”
+repeated continuously amidst a tumult of clamour, once more burst forth.
+
+Napoleon continued and concluded, turning to his favourite Pretorians:
+“Soldiers of the Imperial Guard, swear to surpass yourselves in the
+campaign which is now about to open, to die round your Eagles rather
+than permit foreigners to dictate terms to your country!” He ceased
+after that, and once again the air vibrated with shouts of “We swear!
+We swear!” and ejaculations of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the soldiers and
+the throng of onlookers cramming the stands around.[40]
+
+The military _finale_ of the day was the march past of the assembled
+troops before the Emperor, in slow time, headed by the Eagles. “Nothing
+could have been more imposing,” says one of the spectators, “than
+this concluding display in the magnificent pageant. Amid the crash
+of military music, the blaze of martial decoration, the glitter of
+innumerable arms, 50,000 men passed by. The immense concourse of
+beholders, their prolonged shouts and cheers, the occasion, the Man,
+the mighty events which hung in suspense, all concurred to excite
+feelings and reflections which only such a scene could have produced.”
+On the other hand, we have this from a colder critic of the scene: “The
+display was without heart, and theatrical; the vows of the soldiers
+were made without warmth. There was but little real enthusiasm: the
+shouts were not those of future victors of another Austerlitz and
+Wagram, and the Emperor knew it!” Which are we to believe?
+
+According to Savary, who was close beside him, Napoleon, for his part,
+was satisfied with the enthusiasm of the soldiers. “The Emperor left
+the Field of Mars confident that he might rely on the sentiments then
+manifested towards him, and from that moment his only care was to meet
+the storm that was forming in Belgium.”
+
+[Sidenote: ON THE REGIMENTAL PARADES]
+
+The new Eagles left Paris that night with their escorts. Each, on its
+arrival where its regiment was stationed, was received with elaborate
+ceremony, and formally presented on parade to the assembled officers
+and men; a religious service being held in addition in some cases, at
+which all were sworn individually to give their lives in its defence.
+This, for instance, is what took place with one regiment, the 22nd of
+the Line, stationed with the advanced division of Grouchy’s Army Corps
+on the Belgian frontier at Couvins, near Rocroy, in the Ardennes. “The
+new Eagle,” describes one of the officers, “all fresh from the gilder’s
+shop, was solemnly blessed in the church of Couvins; then each soldier,
+touching it with his hand, swore individually to defend it to the
+death. After the religious service the regiment formed in square, and
+the colonel delivered an address, in which he recalled the old glories
+of the 22nd of the Line, and expressed his conviction that the regiment
+would worthily uphold the old-time fame of the corps in the coming
+campaign. The glowing language was received with great emotion, and as
+of happy augury for the future.”[41]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+AT WATERLOO
+
+“AVE CAESAR! MORITURI TE SALUTANT!”
+
+
+The Eagles figure in four episodes in the story of Waterloo.
+
+They had their part at the outset in that intensely dramatic display
+on the morning of the battle, when, before the eyes of Wellington’s
+soldiers, drawn up with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, and guns
+in position ready to open fire, Napoleon passed his army in review;
+the last parade of the Last Army on the day of its last battle. Said
+Napoleon himself afterwards, in words that are in keeping with the
+resplendent spectacle: “The earth seemed proud to bear so many brave
+men!” (“La terre paraissait orgueilleuse de porter tant de braves!”)
+
+It was a little after nine in the morning that the Last Army of
+Napoleon moved out from its bivouacs of the night before to take up
+its station for the battle. This is how a British hussar, who was
+looking on, describes the opening of the wonderful show: “Marching in
+eleven columns they came up to the front and deployed with rapidity,
+precision, and fine scenic effect. The drums beat, the bands played,
+the trumpets sounded. The light troops in front pressed forward, and
+the rattle of musketry was followed by the retreat of our horsemen and
+foot soldiers. Light wreaths of smoke curled upwards into the misty
+air, and through this thin veil the dense dark columns of the French
+infantry and the gay and gleaming squadrons of French horse were seen
+moving into their positions. Before them was the open valley, yet green
+with the heavy crops; behind them dark fringes of wood, and a thick
+curtain of dreary cloud.
+
+“The French bands struck up so that we could distinctly hear them. Not
+long after, the enemy’s skirmishers, backed by their supports, were
+thrown out; extending as they advanced, they spread over the whole
+space before them. Now and then they saluted our ears with well-known
+music, the whistling of musket-balls. Their columns, preceded by
+mounted officers to take up the alignments, soon began to appear; the
+bayonets flashing over dark masses at different points, accompanied by
+the rattling of drums and the clang of trumpets.
+
+“They took post, their infantry in front, in two lines, 60 yards apart,
+flanked by lancers with their fluttering flags. In rear of the centre
+of the infantry wings were the cuirassiers, also in two lines. In
+rear of the cuirassiers, on the right, the lancers and chasseurs of
+the Imperial Guard, in their splendid but gaudy uniforms: the former
+clad in scarlet; the latter, like hussars, in rifle-green, fur-trimmed
+pelisse, gold lace, bearskin cap. In rear of the cuirassiers, on the
+left, were the horse-grenadiers and dragoons of the Imperial Guard,
+with their dazzling arms. Immediately in rear of the centre was the
+reserve, composed of the 6th Corps, in columns; on the left, and on
+the right of the Genappe road, were two divisions of light cavalry. In
+rear of the whole was the infantry of the Imperial Guard in columns, a
+dense dark mass, which, with the 6th Corps and cavalry, were flanked by
+their numerous artillery. Nearly 72,000 men, and 246 guns, ranged with
+matches lighted, gave an awful presage of the approaching conflict.”
+
+[Sidenote: AS THEY MARCHED ON TO THE FIELD]
+
+Napoleon rode out to watch them as they deployed into position. He took
+his stand at the point where the columns reached the field and wheeled
+off to right and left to form up in readiness for the signal that
+should launch their massed ranks forward across the intervening valley
+against the British position in front. Marshal Soult, Chief of the
+General Staff, rode close behind Napoleon on one side; Marshal Ney, in
+charge of the main attack that day, was on the other. In rear followed
+in glittering array the cavalcade of staff officers, with, dragged
+along after them, tied by a rope to a dragoon orderly, Napoleon’s
+Waterloo guide, the innkeeper De Coster.
+
+Hardly had Napoleon himself ever witnessed before the like of the
+tremendous display of enthusiasm that greeted his presence on the
+field on the morning of that final day. “The drums beat; the trumpets
+sounded; the bands struck up ‘Veillons au salut de l’Empire.’ As they
+passed Napoleon the standard-bearers drooped the Eagles; the cavalrymen
+waved their sabres; the infantrymen held on high their shakos on their
+bayonets. The roar of cheers dominated and drowned the beat of the
+drums and the blare of the trumpets. The ‘_Vive l’Empereurs!_’ followed
+with such vehemence and such rapidity that no commands could be heard.
+And what rendered the scene all the more solemn, all the more moving,
+was the fact that before us, a thousand paces away perhaps, we could
+see distinctly the dull red line [“la ligne rouge sombre”] of the
+English army.”
+
+So one French officer (Captain Martin of the 45th of the Line)
+describes. The shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” says another, a veteran of
+Count d’Erlon’s First Army Corps, “rose more vehemently, louder and
+longer than I ever heard before, for our men were determined that they
+should be heard among the brick-red lines which fringed the crest of
+Mont Saint-Jean.”
+
+It was for the Eagles the counterpart of the Day of the Field of Mars,
+the culminating act of homage to Napoleon from the soldiers of the
+Grand Army.
+
+[Sidenote: HIS IN LIFE AND DEATH]
+
+“The sight of him,” if we may use the words of Lamartine, “was for some
+a recompense for their death, for others an incitement to victory! One
+heart beat between these men and the Emperor. In such a moment they
+shared the same soul and the same cause! When all is risked for one
+man, it is in him his followers live and die. The army was Napoleon!
+Never before was it so entirely Napoleon as now. He was repudiated by
+Europe, and his army had adopted him with idolatry; it voluntarily
+made itself the great martyr of his glory. At such a moment he must
+have felt himself more than man, more than a sovereign. His subjects
+only bowed to his power, Europe to his genius; but his army bent in
+homage to the past, the present, and the future, and welcomed victory
+or defeat, the throne or death with its chief. It was determined on
+everything, even on the sacrifice of itself, to restore him his Empire,
+or to render his last fall illustrious. Accomplices at Grenoble,
+Pretorians at Paris, victims at Waterloo: such a sentiment in the
+generals and officers of Napoleon had in it nothing that was not in
+conformity with the habits and even the vices of humanity. His cause
+was their cause, his crime their crime, his power their power, his
+glory their glory. But the devotion of those 80,000 soldiers was more
+virtuous, for it was more disinterested. Who would know their names?
+Who would pay them for the shedding of their blood? The plain before
+them would not even preserve their bones! To have inspired such a
+devotion was the greatness of Napoleon; to evince it even to madness
+was the greatness of his Army!”
+
+[Sidenote: SOME WHO HAD MET BEFORE]
+
+They knew, too, not a few of them, the stamp of men they were about
+to meet. Never before that day, of course, had Napoleon met British
+soldiers on the battlefield; but there were others present who had, and
+a good many of them.
+
+Many a French regiment at Waterloo had old scores of their own to
+settle, past days to avenge. The 8th of the Line, the fate of whose
+“Eagle with the Golden Wreath” at Barrosa has been recorded, were on
+the field, and dipped their glittering new Eagle, received at the
+“_Champ de Mai_,” in salute as they passed Napoleon that morning. So
+too did the 82nd, whose former battalion Eagles from Martinique are
+at Chelsea now; the 13th of the Line and the 51st, who lost their
+regimental Eagles in the Retiro arsenal of Madrid; the 28th, who met
+their fate, and lost their Eagle under the bullets of the British 28th
+in the Pyrenees. Others were there who had fought against Wellington
+in Spain, and, more fortunate, had preserved their Eagles. Among these
+were the 47th, who on the battlefield at Barrosa lost and regained
+their Eagle; and the 105th, mindful yet of their terrible Salamanca
+experience of what dragoon swords in strong hands could do. The 105th
+were destined, soldiers and Eagle alike, to undergo a fate more
+fearful still, ere the sun should set that day.
+
+Two of the regiments that paraded before Napoleon to meet the soldiers
+of Wellington had met under fire the sailors of Nelson at Trafalgar:
+the 2nd of the Line, now in Jerome Bonaparte’s division of Reille’s
+Army Corps, and the 16th, serving with the Sixth Corps. A third
+regiment, the 70th, which did duty as marines at Trafalgar, was with
+Grouchy, not many miles away; as was the 22nd of the Line, whose
+Eagle, taken at Salamanca, is at Chelsea Hospital, and the 34th, whose
+drum-major’s staff is to this day a prized trophy of the British 34th
+(now the First Battalion of the Border Regiment), won in Spain, when,
+as it so befell, two regiments bearing the same number crossed bayonets
+on the battlefield.[42]
+
+The famous 84th of the Line were at Waterloo, with their proud legend,
+“Un contre dix,” restored at the “_Champ de Mai_,” flaunting proudly
+on their new silken flag as the Eagle bent in salute to Napoleon;
+also, the hardly less widely renowned 46th, the corps of the First
+Grenadier of France, La Tour d’Auvergne, whose name was called at the
+head of the list at that morning’s roll-call and answered with the
+customary answer, “Dead on the Field of Honour”; also, too, Napoleon’s
+former-time favourite, the 75th, mindful still on that last day of
+their glorious youth when “Le 75me arrive et bât l’ennemi”--a motto
+that an earlier colonel of the corps had proposed once to replace on
+the flag by “Veni, Vidi, Vici.”
+
+The Old Guard paraded in their fighting kit, with, as usual, in their
+knapsacks their full-dress uniforms, carried in readiness to be put on
+for Napoleon’s triumphal entry into Brussels.
+
+Drouet d’Erlon rode past at the head of the First Army Corps; Count of
+the Empire in virtue of his rank as a general; once upon a time the
+little son of the postmaster at Varennes, where Louis Seize and Marie
+Antoinette so pitifully ended their attempted flight, harsh old Drouet,
+ex-sergeant of Condé dragoons, from whom he inherited his talent for
+soldiering. General Reille led past the Second Corps. He, curiously,
+had had something of a naval past. He had hardly forgotten that other
+battle-day morning, when he galloped on to the field of Austerlitz, and
+reported himself to the Emperor as having come direct from Cadiz, put
+ashore from the doomed French fleet of Admiral Villeneuve just a week
+before it sailed to fight Trafalgar. Both Reille and his men, above
+all others, were burning with excitement and eagerness that day to get
+at the enemy. They had missed taking part either at Ligny or Quatre
+Bras, through contradictory orders which had kept them marching and
+counter-marching between the two battlefields; unable to reach either
+in time. Smarting under the reproach that they had been useless in the
+campaign, though the pick of the Line was in their ranks, the men one
+and all were burning to retrieve their reputation.
+
+Count Lobau--he took his name from the island in the Danube which
+played so vital a part in the battle of Aspern--was at the head of the
+Sixth Corps, the third of Napoleon’s grand divisions of the army at
+Waterloo. Formerly General Mouton, Napoleon renamed him when he made
+him a Count for his skill and heroism at Aspern. “Mon Mouton,” said
+Napoleon of him once as he watched the general in action, “est un lion.”
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON IN HIGH SPIRITS]
+
+Napoleon himself was in the highest spirits, full of pride and
+confidence. In that mood had he announced his intention of holding the
+review. There was no need to hurry, he said; Blücher and Wellington
+had been driven apart. The parade would pass the time while waiting
+for the soaked ground to get dry, and make it easier for the guns to
+move from point to point. And there was also this. The spectacle would
+have assuredly a disquieting effect on the Dutch and Belgians in
+Wellington’s army. Many of the men in front of him had served with the
+Eagles in former days: all stood nervously in awe, it was notorious, of
+the mighty name and reputation of Napoleon. Hesitating, as some were
+known to be, between their fears and their patriotism, the influence of
+the imposing spectacle might well--believed Napoleon--turn the scale
+and induce them to come over.
+
+This was Napoleon’s plan for the battle, as outlined that morning to
+his brother Jerome. First would be the general preparation for attack
+by a tremendous cannonade all along the line from massed batteries.
+On that, the two army corps of D’Erlon and Reille would advance
+simultaneously and assault in front, supported by cavalry charges
+of cuirassiers. Then, if the English had not yet been beaten, would
+follow the final assault, the crushing blow that it would be impossible
+to resist; to be delivered by the remaining army corps of Lobau and
+the Young Guard, supported by the Middle Guard and the Old Guard. So
+Napoleon planned to fight and win at Waterloo.
+
+[Sidenote: “THE GAME IS WITH US”]
+
+Of the ultimate issue of the day he flattered himself there could be
+no two opinions. “At the last I have them, these English!” “(Enfin je
+les tiens, ces Anglais!”) he exclaimed jubilantly as he reconnoitred
+Wellington’s position in the early morning. At breakfast with the two
+Marshals, Soult and Ney, he declared that the odds were 90 to 10 in his
+favour. “Wellington,” he said to Ney, “has thrown the dice, and the
+game is with us.”
+
+He turned fiercely on Soult, who, knowing the mettle of the British
+soldier from experience, had entreated him to recall Grouchy’s 30,000
+men from watching the Prussians near Wavre.
+
+“You think because Wellington has defeated you, that he must be a very
+great general! I tell you he is a bad general, and the English are but
+poor troops! This, for us, will only be an affair of a _déjeuner_--a
+picnic!”
+
+“I hope so,” was all that Soult said in reply.
+
+At that moment Reille and General Foy, experienced Peninsular veterans
+both, whose opinions should have had weight, were announced. Said
+Reille, in reply to Napoleon’s asking what he thought: “If well placed,
+as Wellington knows how to draw up his men, and if attacked in front,
+the English infantry is invincible, by reason of its calm tenacity and
+the superiority of its fire. Before coming to close quarters with the
+bayonet we must expect to see half the assaulting troops out of action.”
+
+Interposed Foy: “Wellington never shows his troops, but if he is
+yonder, I must warn your Majesty that the English infantry in close
+combat is the very devil!” (“L’infanterie Anglaise en duel c’est le
+diable!”)
+
+Napoleon lost his temper. With an exclamation of angry incredulity he
+rose hastily from the breakfast table, and the party broke up.
+
+He spent a great part of the day watching the battle from a little
+mound, a short distance from the farm of Rossomme; mostly pacing to
+and fro, his hands behind his back; at times violently taking snuff,
+occasionally gesticulating excitedly. Near by was a kitchen table
+from the farmhouse, covered with maps weighted down with stones, with
+a chair placed on some straw, on which at intervals he rested. Soult
+kept ever near at hand, and the staff remained a little in rear. It was
+not until the afternoon was well advanced that Napoleon got again on
+horseback.
+
+As related by the guide De Coster in conversation with an English
+questioner a few months after Waterloo, this is what passed:
+
+“He had frequent communications with his aides de camp during the day?”
+
+“Every moment.”
+
+“And when they reported what was going on?”
+
+“His orders were always ‘Avancez!’”
+
+“Did he eat or drink during the day?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Did he take snuff?”
+
+“In abundance.”
+
+“Did he talk much?”
+
+“Never, except when he gave orders.”
+
+“What was the general character of his countenance during the day?”
+
+[Sidenote: WHEN THE LAST CHARGE FAILED]
+
+“_Riante!_--till the last charge failed.”
+
+“How did he look then?”
+
+“_Blanc-mort!_”
+
+“Did he say ‘_Sauve qui peut_’?”
+
+“No! When he saw the English infantry rush forward, and the cavalry in
+the intermediate spaces coming down the hill, he said: ‘_A present il
+est fini. Sauvons-nous!_’”[43]
+
+
+HOW WELLINGTON’S TROPHIES WERE WON
+
+It was in Napoleon’s second grand attack that our two Waterloo
+Eagle-trophies, the most famous spoils ever won by the British Army,
+came into Wellington’s hands.
+
+The first attack began about half-past eleven, when Reille’s corps, on
+the French left, made its opening effort against Hougoumont. Intended
+by Napoleon at the outset rather as a feint to mislead Wellington into
+fixing his attention on that side, the stubborn defence of Hougoumont
+involved the Second Corps in a struggle that kept it fully occupied for
+the whole day; unable to take part or be of use elsewhere.
+
+The second grand attack took place shortly after two in the afternoon,
+when Marshal Ney made his tremendous onslaught with thirty-three
+battalions of Drouet d’Erlon’s First Army Corps on the left-centre of
+the British position, to the east of the Charleroi road, where Picton’s
+men held the ground.
+
+[Sidenote: A DARK OBJECT IN THE HAZE]
+
+The launching of Ney’s attack just then came about as the result of
+Napoleon’s sudden and disquieting discovery that the Prussians were
+approaching. It was to have opened an hour earlier, but, because
+of that, had been held back at the last moment. Napoleon, while
+looking round with the idea that Grouchy’s troops might be in sight
+in that quarter, made the discovery with his own eyes. Those round
+him, indeed, at first doubted what the dark object--which appeared
+in the hazy atmosphere like a shadow on the high ground near Mont
+Saint-Lambert, some six miles off to the north-east--really was. Soult
+at first could make out nothing; then he was positive it was a column
+of troops--probably Grouchy’s. The staff, scanning the suspicious
+neighbourhood with their telescopes, asserted that what the Emperor saw
+was only a wood. The arrival of some hussars with a Prussian prisoner,
+whom they had just captured while trying to get round with a despatch
+from Bülow to Wellington to announce the approach of the Prussian
+Fourth Corps, settled the question.
+
+Napoleon paced backwards and forwards for a minute, taking pinches
+of snuff incessantly. Then he ordered off his Light Cavalry to
+reconnoitre; dictated to Soult an urgent message recalling Grouchy; and
+sent off an aide de camp to tell Lobau to wheel the Sixth Corps to the
+right, facing towards Saint-Lambert. After that he gave Ney orders to
+open his attack.
+
+Ney took in hand his work forthwith, and at once a terrific cannonade
+opened. Eighty French field-guns, a third of Napoleon’s artillery on
+the field, began firing together from the plateau in front of La Belle
+Alliance; storming furiously with shot and shell to break down the
+British resistance, and clear the way for the onset of the charging
+columns. Without slackening an instant the guns thundered incessantly
+for nearly an hour; getting back from the British artillery in reply a
+fire that was at least as vigorous and no less effective.
+
+[Sidenote: “EN AVANT!” “VIVE L’EMPEREUR!”]
+
+Then Ney gave the word to advance.
+
+Immediately the French infantry were on the move. They went forward
+massed in four divisions; in four solid columns of from four to
+five thousand men each, advancing _en échelon_ from the left, with
+intervals between of about four hundred paces. Eight battalions made
+up each column, except that of the second division, which had nine.
+The battalions stood drawn up in lines, three deep, with a front of
+two hundred files. They were packed closely, one behind the other;
+with intervals between, from front to rear, of only five paces. So
+closely were they wedged together, that there was barely room between
+the battalions for the company officers. Two brigadiers, Quiot and
+Bourgeois, led the left column, General Allix, their chief, being
+elsewhere; General Donzelot, a keen soldier and universally popular as
+the best hearted and most genial of good fellows, headed the second
+column; Marcognet, a grim, hard-bitten veteran, a prime favourite with
+Marshal Ney for his dogged determination in action, had the third;
+General Durutte was in charge of the fourth, away to the right.
+
+With their battalion-drums jauntily rattling out the _pas de charge_,
+amid excited cries and loud exultant shouts of “En avant!” “Vive
+l’Empereur!” the columns stepped off. Ahead of them raced forward at a
+run swarming crowds of _tirailleurs_; extending fan-wise as they went,
+spreading out widely across the front in skirmishing array. The four
+massed columns surged quickly forward and over the edge of the plateau
+down the slope on to the space of shallow valley between the armies.
+As they did so, from the moment they crossed the crest-line and dipped
+below, a fierce hurricane of fire beat in their faces. Round-shot and
+shrapnel swept the columns through and through, tearing long bloody
+lanes through the densely packed masses of men.
+
+Marshal Ney accompanied the first column for some part of the way,
+riding by the side of Drouet d’Erlon.
+
+As they crossed the intervening ground below, the death-dealing
+British guns fired down on them incessantly, but in spite of all, they
+stoutheartedly moved forward, without checking their pace. It was
+terribly toilsome work in places: now they had to plough laboriously
+over sodden and slippery ground; now to trample their way through
+cornfields with standing grain-crops nearly breast-high, or, where
+trodden down, tangling round the men’s feet.
+
+Quiot’s brigade turned off to attack La Haye Sainte, but the rest of
+the division, Bourgeois’ men and the three other columns, held on their
+way, moving in dense phalanxes of gleaming bayonets up the slopes.
+
+The second column, Donzelot’s, reached the top a little in advance of
+the others, and was met by Kempt’s brigade of Picton’s troops, which
+charged it and forced it to yield ground.
+
+A moment later Marcognet’s column reached the British line, coming up
+over the crest of the hill immediately in front of Picton’s Highland
+Brigade.
+
+Received with a furious outburst of musketry from all along the
+extended British line, Marcognet’s leading files were thrown into some
+confusion by the hail of bullets. They were, however, veterans, and
+though their ranks were shaken, they still pressed on, amid a tumult of
+fierce cries and shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” and the wild clash and
+rattle of their drums.
+
+But they got no farther. The British brigadier on the spot, Sir Dennis
+Pack, called on the nearest Highland regiment, the 92nd, to charge them
+with the bayonet. A moment after that, all unexpectedly, the cavalry of
+the Union Brigade were on them.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HIGHLANDERS DASH FORWARD]
+
+The Highlanders dashed forward with exultant cheers and levelled
+bayonets, taking the French volley that met them without firing back a
+shot. They did not, however, get up to the French, nor actually cross
+steel on steel. As the Highlanders got within a dozen yards the column
+suddenly stopped short, and some of the men in front seemed suddenly
+to be panic-stricken. A moment before all were madly yelling out:
+“Forward!” “Victory!” Now they began to turn their backs in disorder.
+
+It was not, though, at the sight of the bayonets. They had seen and
+heard something else. The thundering beat of approaching horse-hoofs
+shook the ground.
+
+With a trampling turmoil of horse-hoofs the cavalrymen of the British
+Union Brigade burst on the scene, galloping forward from their former
+post in rear of Picton’s infantry. The Scots Greys were on the left;
+the Inniskillings in the centre; the Royal Dragoons on the right.
+
+Marcognet’s men heard their approach, and the next moment saw the
+horsemen coming at them. The unexpected sight startled and staggered
+them; and some of those in the front line gave way. The alarm spread
+at once, as most of the rest realised what was approaching. The whole
+column swayed to and fro violently. Then it lost cohesion and began to
+roll back in mingled ranks down-hill.
+
+A moment later the Greys were among them. “The smoke in which the head
+of the French column was enshrouded had not cleared away when the Greys
+dashed into the mass.
+
+“Highlanders and Greys charged together, while shrill and wild from
+the Highland ranks sounded the mountain pipe, mingled with shouts of
+‘Scotland for ever!’” So an officer describes. The men of the 92nd
+seized hold of the stirrup-leathers of the horsemen, and charged with
+them. “All rushed forward, leaving none but the disabled in their
+rear.”
+
+[Illustration: WATERLOO
+
+The Charge of the Union Brigade]
+
+[Sidenote: A SHOUT OF “ATTENTION! CAVALRY!”]
+
+“The dragoons,” describes Captain Siborne, “having the advantage of
+the descent, appeared to mow down the mass, which, bending under the
+pressure, quickly spread itself outwards in all directions. Yet in
+that mass were many gallant spirits who could not be brought to yield
+without a struggle; and these fought bravely to the death.”
+
+Says some one on the French side: “We heard a shout of ‘Attention!
+Cavalry!’ Almost at the same instant a crowd of red dragoons mounted on
+grey horses swept down upon us like the wind. Those who had straggled
+were cut to pieces without mercy. They did not fall upon our columns to
+ride through and break us up--we were too deep and massive for that;
+but they came down between the divisions, slashing right and left with
+their sabres and spurring their horses into the flanks of the columns
+to cut them in two. Though they did not succeed in this, they killed
+great numbers and threw us into confusion.”
+
+The foremost French battalion of Marcognet’s column was the 45th of
+the Line, one of Napoleon’s favourite corps, recruited in the capital,
+and always spoken of by him as “Mes braves Enfants de Paris.” Said he
+of them indeed once, when pointing them out to the Russian Envoy at
+the grand review of June 1810: “Mark those soldiers, Prince: that is
+my 45th--my brave children of Paris! If ever cartridges are burned
+between my brother the Emperor of Russia and me, I will show him the
+efficiency of my 45th. It was they who stormed your Russian batteries
+at Austerlitz. They are scamps [“des vauriens”] off duty, but lions
+on campaign; you should see their dash, their intrepidity; above all,
+their cheerfulness under fire!” Small men--“ideal voltigeurs” Napoleon
+also called the 45th--they stood a poor chance against the stalwart
+swordsmen of the Scots Greys.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIGHT FOR THE STANDARD.
+
+Sergeant Ewart of the Scots Greys taking the Eagle of the 45th at
+Waterloo.
+
+From the picture by R. Andsell, A.R.A., at Royal Hospital, Chelsea.]
+
+It was they who were to yield up the first of our British
+Eagle-trophies of Waterloo. The prize fell to a non-commissioned
+officer of the Greys, Sergeant Charles Ewart, a Kilmarnock man, who
+achieved the feat of taking it single-handed. Ewart, an athletic fellow
+of splendid physique and herculean strength, six feet four in his
+stockings, and a notable _sabreur_, was plunging through the struggling
+press of infantry, slashing out to right and left, when he caught sight
+of the Eagle of the 45th, with its gorgeous new silken flag, bearing
+the glittering inscription in letters of gold--“Austerlitz, Jena,
+Friedland, Essling, Wagram.” It was being hurried away to the rear for
+safety in the middle of a small band of devoted men who surrounded
+it, and were fighting hard with their bayonets to keep the British
+off. Sergeant Ewart saw that and rode straight for the Eagle-bearer.
+Parrying the bayonet-thrusts at him as he got up, he cut down the
+French officer who carried the Eagle, and then had a fight with two
+others. These, first one and then the other, were killed or disabled
+by the sergeant, who in the end carried off the splendid trophy
+triumphantly.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW EWART TOOK THE EAGLE]
+
+Ewart himself, in a letter to his father, tells his own story of the
+taking of the Eagle:
+
+“He and I had a hard contest for it. He thrust for my groin; I parried
+it off and cut him through the head, after which I was attacked by one
+of their lancers, who threw his lance at me, but missed the mark by my
+throwing it off with my sword, at my right side. Then I cut him from
+the chin upwards, which went through his teeth. Next I was attacked by
+a foot-soldier, who, after firing at me, charged me with his bayonet;
+but he very soon lost the combat, for I parried it and cut him down
+through the head. That finished the contest for the Eagle.”
+
+Napoleon was watching the progress of the fight through his glasses. He
+witnessed the charge of the Scots Greys--unaware, of course, that it
+was his pet “Enfants de Paris” who were undergoing their fate. “Qu’ils
+sont terribles ces chevaux gris!” was the exclamation that, according
+to the guide De Coster, fell from Napoleon’s lips at the sight. The
+Greys cut his unlucky 45th to pieces, and had overthrown the rest of
+Marcognet’s Division in three minutes. “In three minutes,” says a
+British officer in the charge, “the column was totally overthrown and
+numbers of them taken prisoners.”
+
+Sabring their way through the remnants of the 45th, and leaving the
+prisoners to be secured by the Highlanders, the Greys then charged the
+supporting regiment, the 25th of the Line. These, “lost in amazement
+at the suddenness and wildness of the charge and its terrific effect
+on their comrades on the higher ground in front,” were caught in the
+act of trying to form square. Some of them fired a few shots at the
+dragoons, but the impetus of the first charge carried the Greys in
+among them with a rush, driving in the foremost ranks and making the
+rest of the column in rear roll back and break up. In panic and despair
+they threw down their muskets and, according to a British officer,
+“surrendered in crowds.” The Eagle of the 25th, however, was saved.
+It was carried safely off the field, and is now one of the Napoleonic
+relics at the Invalides.
+
+Ewart was at once sent to Brussels with the trophy, and on his arrival
+carried it through the crowded streets “amidst the acclamations of
+thousands of spectators who saw it.” He was given an ensigncy in the
+3rd Royal Veteran Battalion in recognition of his exploit. The sword he
+used at Waterloo is now among the treasures of Chelsea Hospital, and
+Ewart’s old regiment bears embroidered on its standard a French Eagle,
+with the legend “Waterloo.”[44]
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHARGE OF THE “ROYALS”]
+
+Within a few moments of Sergeant Ewart capturing the Eagle of the 45th,
+an officer of the Royal Dragoons, Captain A. K. Clark (afterwards Sir
+A. K. Clark-Kennedy) took, also in hand-to-hand fight, the other Eagle
+sent home by Wellington from Waterloo--that of the 105th of the Line,
+the leading regiment of Bourgeois’ Brigade.
+
+The Royals, on the right of the Union Brigade, came down on the French
+left column. That, as yet, had had no enemy in front of it, and was
+advancing with cheers and shouts of triumph across the crest-line of
+the ridge. It overlapped and extended beyond the flank of what had been
+Picton’s line, and so far had only been fired at from a distance by
+artillery and part of the 95th. Suddenly the French were startled by
+the apparition of a mass of cavalry quite near; coming on within eighty
+or ninety yards of them--emerging from the battle-smoke at a gallop.
+
+The sight took them completely by surprise. The loud shouts of
+triumph stopped abruptly. “The head of the column,” describes one of
+the Royals, “appeared to be seized with a panic, gave us a fire which
+brought down about twenty men, went instantly about, and endeavoured
+to regain the opposite side of the hedges.” They had just crossed the
+Wavre road along the slope, about halfway up.
+
+It was the men of one corps, the 105th of the Line, who so turned back.
+They, of all in the regiments of Napoleon’s army, knew what it was to
+be charged by cavalry. They had had one fearful experience of what
+cold steel in strong hands could do, and wanted no second. They were
+the same 105th whom Wellington’s Hanoverian Dragoons, in the pursuit
+after Salamanca, had ridden down and slaughtered so mercilessly. Once
+more the fearful fate was about to overtake them--was at hand, was on
+them! In the ranks were many veterans who had served in the 105th in
+Spain before 1814, and had rejoined on Napoleon’s return from Elba.
+The slaughter after Salamanca was a grim and horrifying memory in the
+regiment that every man shuddered to recall. It all came back vividly
+to them now, as the flashing sabres of the Royal Dragoons burst into
+view, making for them across the ridge. The whole regiment gave back
+and broke, turning for help to the supporting 28th in rear.
+
+But they were not able to reach their refuge in time. Without drawing
+rein the Royals pressed home their charge. They were into the 105th in
+a moment, cutting them down on all sides.
+
+[Sidenote: HOW THE SECOND EAGLE WAS TAKEN]
+
+In that _mêlée_ the Eagle of the 105th met its fate. Captain
+Clark-Kennedy himself describes how that came about--how he came to
+take the Eagle. He was in command of the centre squadron, leading
+through the thick of the ill-fated infantrymen.
+
+“I did not see the Eagle and Colour (for there were two Colours, but
+only one with an Eagle) until we had been probably five or six minutes
+engaged. It must, I should think, have been originally about the centre
+of the column, and got uncovered from the change of direction. When I
+first saw it, it was perhaps about forty yards to my left, and a little
+in my front. The officer who carried it, and his companions, were
+moving with their backs towards me, and endeavouring to force their way
+through the crowd.
+
+“I gave the order to my squadron, ‘Right shoulders forward! Attack the
+Colour!’ leading direct on the point myself. On reaching it I ran my
+sword into the officer’s right side, a little above the hip-joint. He
+was a little to my left side, and he fell to that side, with the Eagle
+across my horse’s head. I tried to catch it with my left hand, but
+could only touch the fringe of the flag; and it is probable it would
+have fallen to the ground, had it not been prevented by the neck of
+Corporal Styles’ horse, who came close up on my left at the instant,
+and against which it fell. Corporal Styles was standard-coverer: his
+post was immediately behind me, and his duty to follow wherever I led.
+
+“When I first saw the Eagle, I gave the order ‘Right shoulders forward!
+Attack the Colour!’ and on running the officer through the body I
+called out twice together, ‘Secure the Colour! Secure the Colour! It
+belongs to me!’ This order was addressed to some men close to me, of
+whom Corporal Styles was one.
+
+“On taking up the Eagle I endeavoured to break the Eagle off the pole,
+with the intention of putting it into the breast of my coat, but I
+could not break it. Corporal Styles said, ‘Pray, sir, do not break it,’
+on which I replied, ‘Very well. Carry it to the rear as fast as you
+can. It belongs to me!’”
+
+Taking hold of the Eagle, Corporal Styles turned away. He had a fight
+to get through with it, and had, we are told, literally to cut his way
+back to safety.
+
+Captain Clark-Kennedy, who received two wounds and had two horses
+killed under him, was given the C.B. He was granted later, as an
+augmentation to his family arms, the representation of a Napoleonic
+Eagle and flag; with for crest a “demi-dragoon holding a flag with an
+Eagle on it.” Corporal Styles was appointed to an ensigncy in the West
+India Regiment. The Royal Dragoons wear the device of a Napoleonic
+Eagle as collar-badge, and bear an Eagle embroidered on their standard.
+
+[Sidenote: WHERE ANOTHER FLAG WAS FOUND]
+
+As with the 45th, so with the 105th--both battalions of each regiment
+lost their colours; the regimental Eagle and the “fanion” of the second
+battalion. The “fanion” of the 105th, described as “a dark blue silken
+flag, with on it the words ‘105me Régiment d’Infanterie de Ligne,’”
+came into British possession in a manner that is not clear. It was not
+taken in fight by the Royals. Was it picked up on the field after the
+battle by some camp-follower and sold? Its existence and whereabouts
+remained unknown until some twenty-four years afterwards. As it
+happened, curiously, General Clark-Kennedy, as he then was, himself
+lighted upon it by chance, hanging in the hall of Sir Walter Scott’s
+home at Abbotsford. How it got there, in spite of all inquiries, the
+general was unable to discover.
+
+Two other Eagles, it would appear, had adventures at Waterloo.
+
+One, according to an unconfirmed story, was taken and lost by the
+Inniskillings, who charged the 54th and 55th of the Line, stationed
+at the rear of Bourgeois’ Brigade, just after the Royals attacked the
+leading battalion of that column. A trooper named Penfold claimed to
+have taken the Eagle of one of the two regiments. “After we charged,”
+he said, “I saw an Eagle which I rode up to, and seized hold of it.
+The man who bore it would not give it up, and I dragged him along by
+it for a considerable distance. Then the pole broke about the middle,
+and I carried off the Eagle. Immediately after that I saw a comrade,
+Hassard, in difficulties, and, giving the Eagle to a young soldier of
+the Inniskillings, I went to his aid. The Eagle got dropped and lost.”
+
+The second of these two Eagles is said to have been captured by the
+Blues, the Royal Horse Guards, and then lost in much the same way. “A
+private in the Blues,” records Wellington’s Supplemental Despatches,
+“killed a French officer and took an Eagle; but his own horse being
+killed, he could not keep it.” A French officer also mentions the
+taking of the Eagle by the Blues and its recovery.
+
+About the time that the ill-fated 45th of the Line and the 105th lost
+their Eagles in front of Picton’s Division, another Eagle elsewhere had
+a narrow escape from capture, being saved by its colonel’s personal
+act. That took place in front of Hougoumont, with the Eagle of the
+1st of the Line. The regiment was in Jerome Bonaparte’s Division in
+front of Hougoumont, and had made an attack on the outbuildings of
+the château, which the defenders had beaten off. At the last moment,
+as the French assault recoiled, the Eagle-bearer and his two fellows
+were shot down together. The battalion fell back, leaving the Eagle
+lying on the ground in the open, beside its dead guardians. For the
+moment, apparently, the British defenders did not see the trophy thus
+left within their reach. Before they did so Colonel Cubières, of the
+1st of the Line, discovered its loss and saw where it had fallen. He
+ran out by himself, picked up the Eagle, and, escaping harm of any
+kind, carried it back to the regiment. According to M. Thiers, “the
+English officers checked the fire of their men while the deed was being
+performed, in admiration of his courage”--an interesting detail in the
+story if true!
+
+
+THE LAST ATTACK AND AFTER: THE EAGLES OF THE GUARD
+
+[Sidenote: THE EAGLES OF THE GUARD]
+
+In the third episode in the story of Waterloo we strike another note.
+How the Eagles of the Guard fared in the closing hour of the battle,
+when Napoleon staked his last desperate throw and lost--that final
+phase remains to tell.
+
+Fourteen Eagles of the Guard were on the field. All came safely through
+the battle and survived the risks and perils of the night retreat that
+followed, to recross the frontier with the rallied remnants of the
+stricken host. Only three, however, are now in existence: one at the
+Invalides; the other two in private keeping in France. The remaining
+eleven were, some of them at any rate, destroyed by the officers
+on the final disbanding of the Grand Army, refusing to give them up
+to the emissaries of the Bourbon _régime_ sent to receive them for
+conveyance to Vincennes, where as many as could be got hold of among
+the regimental Eagles underwent their fate by fire.
+
+Five Eagles went forward in the great last-hope attack of the Guard
+against the centre of Wellington’s position, the overthrow of which
+cost Napoleon the battle. They were the Eagles of the 3rd and 4th
+Grenadiers of the Guard, and of three regiments of the Chasseurs of
+the Guard, the 1st, 3rd, and 4th. All five are among those that have
+disappeared since Waterloo.
+
+Close beside the Eagle of the 3rd Grenadiers it was that Marshal Ney
+fought so heroically, as he led in person the historic grand attack of
+the Imperial Guard. His fifth horse was shot under Ney in the advance,
+and he then drew his sword and strode forward on foot alongside the
+Eagle-bearer. So he led until the column reeled back and broke under
+the sudden attack of the British Guards across the crest-line of the
+slope. At that moment Ney lost his footing, and fell in the confusion.
+“He disappeared,” says a French officer, “just at the moment that
+the Guard gave way. But he was up again in a moment, and with voice
+and gesture strove his hardest to rally them.” It was to no purpose.
+The great column wavered, swayed, and then fell apart in disorder.
+“Mitraillée, fusillée, reduit à quinze ou seize cent hommes, la
+Garde recule!” Ney was swept off his feet in the retreat, and borne
+backwards; carried away in the rush of the fugitives, struggling
+helplessly in the crowd. “Bathed in perspiration, his eyes blazing with
+indignation, foaming at the mouth, his uniform torn open, one of his
+epaulets cut away by a sabre-slash, his star of the Legion of Honour
+dented by a bullet, bleeding, muddy, heroic, holding a broken sword in
+his hand, he shouted to the men, ‘See how a Marshal of France dies on
+the battlefield!’ But it was in vain: he did not die.”
+
+[Sidenote: NEY’S LAST HEROIC EFFORT]
+
+Then Ney, mounting a trooper’s horse, made for a regiment near, whose
+men were falling back in fair order, with their Eagle borne defiantly
+in their midst--the 8th of the Line. With them was a battalion of
+the 95th, also displaying their Eagle gallantly as they, too, tried
+to withdraw in regular formation. Ney made them face about, and put
+himself at their head. He appealed to them in the words he had used
+just before, when trying to rally the Guard: “Suivez moi, camarades. Je
+vais vous montrer comment meurt un Maréchal de France sur le champ de
+bataille!” The men turned to face the enemy, with a shout of “Vive le
+Maréchal Ney!” They charged forward towards where some of the red-coats
+of Kempt’s and Pack’s infantry showed themselves in the van of the
+pursuers. But at the same instant some horsemen of a Prussian hussar
+regiment dashed at them at a gallop. The sight of the horsemen was too
+much for their shattered nerves. They turned their backs and ran off
+panic-stricken. Ney’s last rallied band broke and fled, with cries of
+“Sauve qui peut!”
+
+Yet not quite all. A small band of the men of the 8th kept round their
+Eagle, and retired in order, still holding it up. _Chef de Bataillon_
+Rullière, of the 95th, snatched the Eagle of that regiment from its
+bearer, broke the staff, and carried off the Eagle concealed under his
+coat.
+
+Ney’s sixth horse was shot under him as the men turned. Again getting
+to his feet he staggered on in the midst of the crowd of fugitives
+until he at last found his way into one of the rallying squares formed
+in rear by some of the survivors of the Guard. There now, beside the
+Eagle of the 4th Chasseurs of the Guard, Ney made his last stand at
+Waterloo--at bay, desperate. He fought in the square, “shoulder to
+shoulder with the rest, shooting and thrusting with a musket and
+bayonet he got hold of,” as the square slowly made its retreat off the
+field, until in the darkness it broke up, and the men dispersed. The
+devotion of a mounted officer who met the marshal on foot, utterly worn
+out and by himself, and gave up his horse to him, enabled Ney in the
+end to reach a place of safety.
+
+Napoleon was watching the Second Column of the Guard at the moment
+of its disaster. How the overwhelming catastrophe burst on his gaze,
+abruptly and all unexpectedly, makes one of the most dramatic of
+historic scenes. At that moment Napoleon was about to lead in person
+the reserve of the Guard, three battalions which he had retained near
+him throughout, to reinforce the fighting line.
+
+“While they were being marshalled for the attack--one battalion
+deployed, with a battalion in close column on either side--he kept his
+glass turned upon the conflict in which he intended to bear a part.
+
+“Suddenly his hand fell.
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON IS HORROR-STRICKEN]
+
+“‘Mais ils sont mêlée!’ he ejaculated in a tone of horror, his voice
+hollow and quavering. He addressed his aide de camp, Count Flahault,
+who was under no illusion as to what troops were meant. The sun had
+just set. There was no radiance to prevent all men seeing what was
+going on out there in the north-west.”
+
+Immediately on that followed the general collapse: the almost
+instantaneous break up of the French army all along the line.
+
+“First the trampled corn in rear was sprinkled, then it was covered,
+with a confused mass of men moving south; behind and among them the
+sabres of Vivian’s hussars and Vandeleur’s dragoons rose and fell,
+hacking and hewing on every side.
+
+“‘La Garde recule!’ sounded like a sob in the motionless ranks of
+the Old Guard (the three battalions near Napoleon), and sped with
+astonishing swiftness to every part of the field. ‘La Garde recule!’
+cried the men of Allix, Donzelot, and Marcognet, and began to melt
+away from the vantage ground they had recently so nobly won. ‘La Garde
+recule!’ whispered Reille’s columns, still unbroken on the left. Far
+on the right, Durutte’s battalions, suddenly confronted by the heads
+of Ziethen’s columns, where they had been told to look for Grouchy’s,
+caught up the word. Next, the uneasy murmur, ‘Nous sommes trahis!’ was
+heard--for was there not treason? Had not General Bourmont and his
+staff, and other officers, openly gone over to the enemy? ‘La Garde
+recule!’ Oh fatal cry! soon swelling into one still more dreadful--last
+tocsin of the soldier’s agony--‘Sauve qui peut!’ Papelotte and La Haye
+were abandoned, and from the east, as already from the west, the wreck
+of the Last Army rolled towards the Charleroi road.”
+
+The Eagle that was close beside Napoleon at that most awful moment of
+his life, as he saw his Guard break and fall back in confusion, is at
+the Invalides now. It is the Eagle of the 2nd Grenadiers of the Guard;
+one of the three reserve battalions that were forming up to go forward
+at the moment of the catastrophe.
+
+[Illustration: WATERLOO
+
+THE FINAL PHASE
+
+Sketch Plan to show the attack and the defeat of the columns of the
+Guard.]
+
+Napoleon watched the panic begin to spread over the field for a brief
+moment. Then he roused himself to try to meet the impending crash.
+First he formed the Guard battalions nearest him into square. Then he
+sent off his last remaining gallopers, in the futile hope that it might
+be possible to rally the men of the nearest divisions to him before
+they had time to scatter. But the effort was hopeless: it was beyond
+possibility to stem the raging torrent of frantic soldiers, now in full
+flight on every side, racing past in the direction of Jemmapes. The lie
+that he had sent round just before the Guard started on its charge,
+that Grouchy had arrived, recoiled on his own head. The panic-stricken
+soldiers would not be stopped. “They had been told that Grouchy had
+arrived. They had found instead Ziethen’s terrible Prussians. Now they
+would listen to nothing. The fugitives streamed past, rushing on and
+bellowing as they went that they had been betrayed and that all was
+lost!”
+
+[Sidenote: NAPOLEON SHELTERS IN A SQUARE]
+
+After that Napoleon rode into the nearest square, and took shelter in
+its midst. It was that of the Second Battalion of the 2nd Chasseurs
+of the Guard. The square moved off at once towards La Belle Alliance,
+and, turning there into the Charleroi road, took its way back towards
+Rossomme, half a mile in rear, where the two battalions of the 1st and
+2nd Grenadiers of the Old Guard had remained all day.
+
+At Rossomme Napoleon passed to the square of the First Battalion of the
+1st Grenadiers of the Old Guard. The two battalions of the Guard there
+had already formed in squares of their own accord, with their Eagles
+held on high in their midst. They were joined by the 1st Chasseurs of
+the Guard, coming up from Caillou, a short distance in rear. The three
+squares held their ground firmly, beating off the headmost of the
+Prussian attacks. They remained halted until, on some of the Prussian
+artillery nearing the place, Napoleon himself gave the order to move
+away in retreat.
+
+At a slow step, the drums rolling out the stately “Grenadier’s March,”
+sullen and defiant, the Old Guard, with Napoleon in the midst of the
+square of the 1st Grenadiers, set forth on their last journey. Their
+Eagle was still borne on high in their midst--close beside Napoleon.
+It is the Eagle that is now treasured in Paris by the descendants of
+General Petit, the commander of the Grenadiers at Waterloo--the Eagle
+of the Adieu of Fontainebleau; the same Eagle that led the Guard at
+Austerlitz and Jena, at Eylau and Friedland, at Wagram, and throughout
+all the horrors of the retreat from Moscow. It escorted Napoleon off
+the field after Waterloo.
+
+[Illustration: THE SQUARE OF THE OLD GUARD AT BAY AFTER WATERLOO.
+
+From the picture by H. Bellangé.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE OLD GUARD MARCH AWAY]
+
+The Grenadiers of the Guard escorted Napoleon for four miles from the
+battlefield, beating back repeated efforts that were made by Prussian
+cavalry to break up their ranks. To maintain their formation to the
+last was their only hope of safety; and terrible were the measures
+they took to safeguard themselves and keep their ranks intact. Friend
+or foe who attempted to get in among them was mercilessly shot down.
+“Nous tirons,” describes General Petit, “sur tout ce qui presentaient,
+amis et ennemis, de peur de laisser entrer les uns avec les autres.”
+They took their way along the Charleroi road; the 2nd Grenadiers
+marching on the _chaussée_ itself, the 1st Grenadiers to the left of
+the road. With marvellous calmness and cool courage did the veterans
+proceed on their way. “Every few minutes they stopped to rectify the
+alignment of the faces of the square, and to keep off pursuit by means
+of rapid and well-sustained musketry.”
+
+Erckmann-Chatrian’s soldier of the 25th, who was amongst the fugitives
+streaming across country on either side of the high-road, tells how
+he heard from afar the stately drum-beat of their march. “In the
+distance _La Grenadière_ sounded like an alarm-bell in the midst of a
+conflagration. Yet, indeed, this was much more terrible--it was the
+last drum-beat of France! This rolling of the drums of the Old Guard
+sounding forth in the midst of disaster had in it something infinitely
+pathetic as well as terrible.”
+
+And of the scene with Napoleon in the square of the Grenadiers as it
+tramped its way along, we have this from Thiers: “With sombre but calm
+countenance, he rode in the centre of the square, his far-seeing glance
+as it were probing futurity and realising that more than a battle
+had been lost that day. He only interrupted his gloomy meditations to
+inquire now and again for his lieutenants, some of whom were among
+the wounded near him. The soldiers all round seemed stupefied by the
+disaster. The men moved stolidly on, almost without a word to one
+another. Napoleon alone seemed to be able to speak; occasionally
+addressing a few words to the Major-General (Soult), or to his brother
+Jerome, who rode beside him. Now and again, when harassed by the
+Prussian squadrons, the square would halt, and the side that was
+attacked fired on the assailants, after which the sad and silent march
+was resumed.”
+
+Throughout the march, keeping their position at a little distance
+from the squares of the Grenadiers, rode the Horse-Grenadiers and the
+Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard. One of the finest displays of soldierly
+endurance ever made, perhaps, was that given by the Horse-Grenadiers
+of the Guard as the magnificent regiment left the field, “moving at a
+walk, in close columns and in perfect order; as if disdaining to allow
+itself to be contaminated by the confusion that prevailed around it.”
+So describes a British officer who saw them ride away. They beat off
+all attacks and kept steadily and compactly together. “They literally
+walked from the field in the most orderly manner, moving majestically
+along, with their Eagle in their midst, as though merely marching to
+take up their ground for a field-day.” This, further, is what a British
+officer of Light Dragoons, who came up with them in the pursuit, says
+of their heroic demeanour: “Seeing the men of our brigade approach,
+they halted, formed line, and fired a volley--a rare thing for
+dragoons--and waited a few minutes, as much as to say, ‘We are ready to
+receive your charge if you are so disposed’; then finding we did not
+advance, they again continued their slow retreat.”
+
+[Sidenote: A FAMOUS EAGLE NOW IN FRANCE]
+
+The Eagle of the Horse-Grenadiers has disappeared since Waterloo: that
+of the Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard is in existence, in France, in
+the custody of a member of the Bonaparte family. It was preserved by
+General Lefebvre-Desnouettes, Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment, who
+commanded the Chasseurs at Waterloo. Carried in safety to France, the
+Eagle was then taken to America, when the General, on whose head a
+price had been placed, escaped across the Atlantic in the autumn of
+1815. He presented it later to Joseph Bonaparte, in the possession of
+whose representatives the Eagle is now. It still bears attached to the
+staff the green silk guidon-shaped flag, inscribed “Chasseurs de la
+Garde,” and embroidered with gold and silver laurel-leaves, which it
+bore at Waterloo.
+
+Napoleon quitted the square of Grenadiers about two miles from
+Jemmapes. By that time the Prussians had ceased their attacks on the
+Guard for easier prey elsewhere. He rode on at a little distance
+ahead; the battalions of the Guard at the same time re-forming into
+columns of march. They kept with the Emperor until the neighbourhood of
+Jemmapes was reached. There Napoleon and Soult and the others quitted
+the road, betaking themselves across the fields to make their way as
+best they could to Charleroi, whence Napoleon was able to continue his
+flight in a post-chaise.
+
+Yet another of the Waterloo Eagles of the Guard with a story to be told
+of it was that of the 2nd Chasseurs--one of the Eagles that have now
+disappeared. How the Eagle was saved from capture, and finally brought
+through to safety, recalls a remarkable and dramatic incident of the
+battle.
+
+The 2nd Chasseurs was one of the twelve battalions of the Young Guard
+detached by Napoleon late in the afternoon to assist General Lobau and
+the Sixth Army Corps to keep off the Prussian flank attack. Between
+them they saved the army from an even worse catastrophe than that which
+actually befell Napoleon at Waterloo--from having to surrender. For
+nearly an hour after the rout had become general, the Sixth Corps,
+and the battalions of the Young Guard assisting it, by their heroic
+resistance, prevented the Prussians from breaking in on the only line
+of retreat open to the defeated army, and enabled Napoleon to get clear
+away.
+
+[Sidenote: TO SAVE THE REST OF THE ARMY]
+
+“Lobau,” to quote the words of a modern military writer, “recognised
+to the full that he alone interposed between the Prussians and the
+French line of retreat. If he failed, retreat would be cut off, and the
+army taken in rear as well as in front and flank; not a man would get
+away. The fate of the Army, the Emperor, of France, rested on Lobau at
+the supreme moment, and splendidly he did his duty. Dusk had given way
+to dark, only illuminated by the blazing ruins of Planchenoit, before
+Lobau retired, but by that time the rear of the flying army had cleared
+the point of peril, and comparative safety was assured. Still steady,
+and in good order, he took post on the high-road to close the line of
+flight and block pursuit, and the gallant remnant of the Sixth Corps
+and the Young Guard had to bear the full fury of the combined advance
+of the enemy. Nothing at Waterloo can surpass for coolness, courage,
+and determination the heroic resistance of Lobau.”
+
+It was in the village of Planchenoit that the 2nd Chasseurs fought
+side by side with the other battalions of the Guard in that quarter
+under the leadership of General Pelet, to whom Napoleon had specially
+entrusted the defence of the post. Planchenoit was defended foot by
+foot at the point of the bayonet against ever-increasing numbers of the
+Prussians. The 2nd Chasseurs were the last troops of all to quit, after
+contesting the village house by house, cottage by cottage, fighting the
+Prussians man to man among the bushes and walls of the gardens, and
+finally in the churchyard, where they made their last stand at bay,
+desperately combating among the tombstones. Fresh Prussians kept coming
+up to join in the attack, but the 2nd Chasseurs, their Eagle defiantly
+displayed in the midst of the battling throng, resisted stubbornly.
+When at the last they drew off, the whole of Planchenoit was a mass of
+flames, blazing from end to end.
+
+There remained a rough half-mile of open ground before they could get
+to the Charleroi road--the line of retreat along which, by that time,
+a large proportion of the fugitives from the main army had got away.
+The 2nd Chasseurs, in rear of all, as they left their last shelter in
+Planchenoit and were beyond the churchyard walls, were swept down on
+by a furious rush of Prussian cavalry, and half the regiment was cut
+to pieces. The moon was rising by that time, and the Prussians had
+sufficient light for their deadly work.
+
+The survivors, broken up, and thrown in irremediable disorder, could
+after that only run for their lives. But they still bore their Eagle
+among them. It was draped under a black cloth. Somebody, in some house
+in the village, as they were falling back to the churchyard, had, it
+would appear, caught up a strip of crape or black cloth, and hastily
+wrapped it round the Eagle to conceal it in that way from hostile
+eyes. The Eagle-bearer refused to break the Eagle from the staff, and
+hide it under his coat, as others had done elsewhere with other Eagles.
+
+With the Eagle so covered, a small party of devoted soldiers were
+accompanying their standard as the survivors of the Prussian charge
+hastened towards the Charleroi road, when there came yet another attack
+from the Prussian horse, who charged among them and trampled them down
+as the troopers slashed mercilessly at the fugitives. At that moment
+the Eagle and its guardians found themselves near the General. They
+were isolated and cut off in the midst of the wild _mêlée_. Pelet
+caught sight of them, desperately striving to protect the Eagle-bearer,
+who was frantically clutching at the Eagle-staff as he held on to it
+and tried to get through.
+
+[Sidenote: “SAVE YOUR EAGLE OR DIE ROUND IT!”]
+
+Pelet made for the group, shouting at the top of his voice: “Rally,
+Chasseurs! Rally on me! Save your Eagle or die round it!” (“A moi,
+Chasseurs! A moi! Sauvons l’Aigle ou mourons autour d’elle!”)
+
+In the midst of the frenzied tumult his cry for help was somehow heard
+by the men ahead. They turned back in their flight and fought their
+way to the threatened Eagle. Others pressed round to join them, until
+by degrees was formed a compact body between two and three hundred in
+number, who with their bayonets kept the cavalry back as they fought
+their way towards the high-road step by step.
+
+More than once they had to halt and face about, as the Prussian
+horsemen in their repeated attempts to capture the Eagle circled round
+them, and dashed in at them again and again, but, “forming what is
+usually termed a rallying square, and lowering their bayonets, they
+succeeded in repulsing the charges of the cavalry.” At one point in the
+retreat “some guns were brought to bear upon them, and subsequently a
+brisk fire of musketry; but notwithstanding the awful sacrifice which
+was thus offered up in defence of their precious charge, they succeeded
+in reaching the main line of retreat, and saved alike the Eagle and the
+Honour of the Regiment.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Eagles of the Guard all came safely through the turmoil and horrors
+of the night of the rout after Waterloo. And--it seems incredible, but
+the fact is vouched for by several officers--so did the other Eagles of
+the army. All at Waterloo, it is declared, were brought back to France,
+except the two taken from the ill-fated 45th and the 105th of the Line
+by the Scots Greys and the Royals. Those two only remained as trophies
+in the hands of the victors. General Charras, whose good faith we have
+no right to impugn, declares the fact in explicit language, and another
+officer relates how, on the day after the battle, when the rallied
+remains of the army assembled at Phillippeville and Maubeuge, “the
+soldiers wept tears of joy at learning how many of their Eagles had
+been saved.”
+
+[Sidenote: “MAKE WAY FOR THE EAGLE!”]
+
+Says General Charras, describing how the Eagles were saved that night:
+“Two standards had been lost on the battlefield. There was none other
+lost. In the crowd of disbanded horsemen and foot-soldiers, marching
+and running pell-mell, some still armed, others having thrown away or
+broken their sabres and guns under the impulse of rage, of despair, of
+terror, there were to be seen, by the pale light of the moon, little
+groups of officers of every grade, and of soldiers, spontaneously
+collected round the standard of each regiment, and advancing sabre in
+hand, bayonet on the gun, resolute and imperturbable in the midst of
+the general disorder. ‘Place au drapeau!’ cried they when the rout
+arrested their march, and this cry always sufficed to cause the very
+men who had become deaf to every word of command and to all discipline
+to stand aside before them and open a passage. They had often to endure
+peril, they had often to repulse the enemy’s attacks, but they saved
+their conquered flags from the attempts and hands of the conqueror.”
+
+Grouchy also saved all his Eagles--although one had its adventures in
+the attack on Wavre, and was nearly lost to the Prussians. The story
+this time is not exactly creditable to some of those concerned; but
+the regiment in question, it must be said, had but few old soldiers in
+its ranks, having been made up almost entirely of recently levied and
+half-trained conscripts. Also, it had just previously been very roughly
+handled by the Prussians on the battlefield of Ligny. There, indeed, it
+had been charged by cavalry, and had suffered severely. The unfortunate
+regiment was the 70th of the Line.
+
+In Grouchy’s fighting at Wavre they were in Vandamme’s Division, which
+had orders to carry the bridge over the Dyle and storm the town, held
+by the Prussians in considerable force. To give the 70th a chance of
+getting their revenge for Ligny, and winning back the old good name
+of the regiment, Vandamme specially chose them for the post of honour
+in the attack; appointing the 70th to lead the van in the preliminary
+storming of the bridge. They led the attack, dashing forward bravely
+enough at the outset, and got halfway across. Then they stopped short,
+their ranks decimated by the furious fire with which the Prussians
+received them from the houses on the opposite bank, hesitated, went on
+a few paces, stopped again, and finally ran back in panic.
+
+[Sidenote: SAVED BY ANOTHER REGIMENT]
+
+The sight of the sudden rout maddened their leader, Colonel Maury.
+Stooping from his charger, he snatched hold of the Eagle from its
+bearer, and held it up before the men. “What! you scoundrels! You
+dishonoured me two days ago; you are again disgracing me to-day!
+Forward! Follow me!” (“Comment, canaille! Vous m’avez deshonoré
+avant-hier, et vous recidiviez aujourdhui! En avant! Suivez moi!”)
+Brandishing the Eagle the colonel turned his horse to ride back across
+the bridge. The drums beat the charge: the regiment followed. But all
+was to no purpose. As fate willed it, the gallant colonel fell, shot
+dead before he could get across, and at the sight of his fall panic
+again seized the regiment. They ran wildly back again, leaving the dead
+colonel’s body and the Eagle lying halfway across the bridge. The Eagle
+was rescued and brought back by the men of another regiment. Had it not
+been for the sudden rush forward of the leading company of the 22nd of
+the Line, the regiment supporting the 70th in the attack, the Eagle
+would have been taken. Several Prussian soldiers had indeed already
+run forward to pick it up, and their leader was in the act of doing so
+when the foremost of the rescuers arrived, beat back the Prussians, and
+recovered the fallen Eagle.
+
+The failure of this one regiment at Wavre is the only recorded instance
+of bad behaviour before the enemy in the Waterloo campaign. And for
+it too, in view of the composition of the regiment in question, some
+allowance may surely be made.
+
+
+THE EAGLES ANNOUNCE VICTORY TO LONDON
+
+The last of the four episodes is supplemental: the story of how
+Wellington’s Eagle-trophies themselves first announced Waterloo to
+London.
+
+The two Eagles were sent to England immediately after the battle,
+together with Wellington’s Waterloo despatch, by Major the Hon. Henry
+Percy, of the 11th Light Dragoons, who was almost the only member of
+Wellington’s staff who went through the battle unwounded. He arrived
+in London, displaying the Eagles from his post-chaise as he travelled
+through the streets, on the stroke of eleven o’clock on the night of
+Wednesday, June 21.
+
+Up to then not a word had come from Wellington: not a word of reliable
+news as to what had happened had reached England. Rumours of an early
+check to the French had arrived, from unofficial sources, during the
+previous day, but nothing more had been heard, and all London was on
+tenterhooks of suspense.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FIRST RUMOURS IN LONDON]
+
+The battle was fought on Sunday the 18th. But no news of it, or in
+regard to it, of any kind reached England during either Monday or
+Tuesday. There was no intelligence from the seat of war at all. On
+the Wednesday morning the _Times_ announced vaguely that Napoleon had
+struck the first blow unsuccessfully. A Mr. Sutton, of Colchester, it
+said, the owner of packet-boats running between Harwich and Ostend,
+had forwarded a message to the effect that there had been fighting on
+the 15th and 16th and skirmishing on the 17th, and that a fresh battle
+was beginning on the morning of the 18th. His informant at Brussels had
+sent that news. There was no more news until Wednesday afternoon, when
+the _Sun_ came out with a special edition stating that the Government
+had received no despatches, but that “a gentleman who left Ghent on
+Monday, and two others from Brussels, brought word that Sunday’s battle
+had been successful.” All London was in the streets until between ten
+and eleven that night, in a state of eager expectation; but repeated
+inquiries at the Horse Guards, at the War Office, and at the Mansion
+House only met with the answer--“No news yet.”
+
+It was just as the crowds were dispersing, tired of waiting, and taking
+it as certain that nothing could be known until the morning, as the
+clocks were on the stroke of eleven, that Major Percy arrived in London.
+
+“He left the Duchess of Richmond’s ball,” says his niece, Lady Bagot,
+in whose words the story may best be told, “on the night before the
+battle, and had no time to change his dress, or even his shoes, before
+going into action. When he received orders to go to England with the
+despatches, he posted to Antwerp, and there took the first sailing
+boat he could find to convey him to Dover, where he landed in the
+afternoon. He found that a report of the victory had preceded him
+there. The Rothschilds had chartered a fast sloop to lie off Antwerp,
+and bring the first news of the battle to the English shore--news which
+was to be used for Stock Exchange purposes.
+
+“My uncle’s confirmation of the rumour of a great victory was received
+with the greatest relief and enthusiasm. At that time the hotel-keeper
+at Dover, a certain Mr. Wright, had the monopoly of the posting
+arrangements between that port and London. He immediately placed his
+best horses at my uncle’s disposal, and despatched an express to order
+fresh relays all along the road. Besides the despatches my uncle took
+the two captured Eagles of the Imperial Guard with him. These, being
+too large to go into the carriage, were placed so as to stick out of
+the windows, one on each side. In this manner he drove straight to
+the Horse Guards, where he learnt that the Commander-in-Chief, at
+that time the Duke of York, was dining out. He next proceeded to Lord
+Castlereagh’s, and was told that he and the Duke of York were both
+dining with a lady in St. James’s Square. To this house he drove, and
+there learnt that the Prince Regent was also of the dinner-party.
+
+[Sidenote: PRESENTED TO THE PRINCE REGENT]
+
+“Requesting to be shown immediately into the dining-room, he entered
+that apartment bearing the despatches and the Eagles with him. He was
+covered with dust and mud, and, though unwounded himself, bore the
+marks of battle upon his coat. The dessert was being placed upon the
+table when he entered, and as soon as the Prince Regent saw him he
+commanded the ladies to leave the room. The Prince Regent then held out
+his hand, saying, ‘Welcome, Colonel Percy!’ ‘Go down on one knee,’ said
+the Duke of York to my uncle, ‘and kiss hands for the step you have
+obtained.’ Before the despatch could be read, my uncle was besieged
+with inquiries of various prominent officers engaged, and had to answer
+‘Dead’ or ‘Severely wounded’ so often that the Prince Regent burst into
+tears. The Duke of York, though greatly moved, was more composed.
+
+“By this time my uncle was exhausted from fatigue, and begged the
+Prince’s permission to go to his father’s house in Portman Square. The
+crowd was so great in St. James’s Square, that he had the greatest
+difficulty in getting through it and reaching my grandfather’s house,
+which was soon surrounded by anxious multitudes begging for news
+of relations and friends. My uncle told them that the victory was
+complete, but that the number killed and wounded was very large. He
+told them that he would answer more questions next morning.”
+
+The Eagles themselves in fact announced the victory in London. People
+in the streets saw the chaise as it passed on its way with its horses
+at a gallop, racing at full speed along the Old Kent Road, across
+Westminster Bridge, and through Parliament Street to Whitehall, “the
+gleaming lamps showing a French Eagle and the French flags projecting
+from each window.”
+
+The news spread like wild-fire, and before Colonel Percy could reach
+the house where the Prince Regent was dining--Mrs. Boehm’s, in St.
+James’s Square--South London was flocking over Westminster Bridge to
+Whitehall. The West End heard the news immediately afterwards, and
+everybody hurried out again into the streets.
+
+It became quickly known where the chaise had gone after leaving the
+Horse Guards, and promptly an ever-increasing crowd hurried off
+there. Before the despatch had been read an enormous mass of people
+had assembled in St. James’s Square, outside the house. They were
+in time to hear the cheering by the company inside the house that
+greeted the reading of the despatch; the cheers were instantly echoed
+back, accompanied by an outburst of vociferous shouting followed
+by a tremendous chorus of “God save the King!” The windows of the
+dining-room were open, and a moment later the two Eagles with their
+tricolor flags were thrust through. They were held up, with candles
+at either side, to show them plainly, so that all might know that the
+victory had been decisive.
+
+“For a few minutes dustmen’s bells and watchmen’s rattles were sprung
+all over London. Liquor was produced at many a street-corner, and
+toasts were drunk to Wellington and confusion to Bonaparte.”[45]
+
+[Sidenote: HOW PARIS HEARD THE NEWS]
+
+The closing scene took place on Thursday, January 18, 1816--on the
+“General Thanksgiving Day for the Restoration of Peace.” The two
+Eagles were on that day publicly paraded at the Horse Guards and laid
+up in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, with ceremonies similar to those
+that attended the reception of the Barrosa and Salamanca trophies.
+Again the battalions of the Brigade of Guards in England, with their
+bands “in State clothing,” turned out to take part in the display,
+the Eagles, as before, being made to march round the square and do
+formal obeisance to the British flag by being prostrated in the dust
+before the Colour of the King’s Guard of the day, at which sight, as
+on the former occasions, both the troops and the crowd of spectators
+“instantaneously gave three loud huzzas with the most enthusiastic
+feeling.” The Duke of York, as Commander-in-Chief, presided this time
+at the parade. Two sergeants of the Grenadier and Third Guards who had
+been wounded at Waterloo were selected to carry the Eagles; escorted by
+a picked company of eighty-four officers and men “drawn from among the
+heroic defenders of Hougoumont on the field of battle.” Lifeguardsmen
+and Blues just arrived from the Army of Occupation, in France, assisted
+the Foot Guards on parade.
+
+[Sidenote: IN THE CHAPEL ROYAL, WHITEHALL]
+
+The escort entered the Chapel Royal by the two doors in equal
+divisions, the band playing and marching up to the steps of the
+Communion Table, where they filed off to right and left. As soon as
+the band had ceased, the two sergeants bearing the Eagles approached
+the Altar and fixed upon it their consecrated banners. Both the
+Chaplain-General to the Forces (Archdeacon Owen) and the Bishop of
+London, with two Royal Chaplains (“the Rev. Mr. Jones and the Rev. Mr.
+Howlett”), officiated in the service; the Bishop preaching a special
+sermon, with for his text Psalm xx. verses 7 and 8:
+
+    “_Some trust in chariots and some in horses: but we will remember
+    the name of the Lord our God._
+
+    “_They are brought down and fallen: but we are risen and stand
+    upright._”
+
+“After the customary blessing, the band played ‘God save the King!’
+the whole congregation standing. Among those who attended were a
+considerable number of persons of fashion and distinction in public
+life, the Dukes of Gloucester and York, and the Earl of Liverpool,
+and several officers of the Army and Navy, with many elegant and
+distinguished females.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AFTER THE DOWNFALL
+
+
+The remnant of the Waterloo army, as mustered and officially reported
+to Paris on July 1, 1815, after it had been withdrawn by convention
+with the Allies beyond the Loire, numbered some 23,000 of all arms.[46]
+The soldiers had their Eagles with them. The Eagles were still the
+standards of the army, although all was over with Napoleon, and he had
+set out on his flight from Malmaison to the coast near Rochfort--to
+find the _Bellerophon_ awaiting him there.
+
+[Sidenote: PRESENTED AFTER WATERLOO]
+
+The last occasion on which an Eagle of Napoleon’s Army had its part on
+parade was one day, near the Loire, with a regiment not at Waterloo.
+It was when the news of Napoleon’s abdication reached its colonel. He
+was Colonel Bugeaud of the 14th of the Line, in after years the famous
+Marshal who gained Algeria for France. As it happened, the 14th had
+not long received their Eagle from the “_Champ de Mai_.” It had been
+brought by the deputation of the regiment sent to Paris to receive it
+at the hands of the Emperor, but had not yet been formally presented on
+parade, owing to the regiment being on the march from the south-eastern
+frontier of France. The 14th joined the rallied remnants of the
+Waterloo army to the south of the Loire, and there Colonel Bugeaud made
+the presentation of the Eagle. For the occasion he made use of the
+Napoleonic formula of address at such ceremonies, but with a variation
+to suit the altered situation. He took the opportunity to remind the
+regiment that, if the Chief had fallen, they yet owed allegiance to
+their country. “Soldiers of the 14th,” began the colonel, “here is your
+Eagle. It is in the name of the nation that I present it to you. If the
+Emperor, as it is stated, is no longer our Sovereign, France remains.
+It is France who confides this Eagle to you as your standard; it is
+ever to be your talisman of victory. Swear that as long as a soldier
+of the 14th exists no enemy’s hand shall touch it!” “We swear it!”
+responded the soldiers all together, and then the officers stepped
+forward in front of the ranks, waving their swords and again shouting,
+“We swear it!”
+
+The end for the Eagles of Napoleon came on August 3, 1815. On that
+day the Ministerial decree was promulgated, abolishing them and the
+tricolor flag, and disbanding the entire Army. The white Bourbon flag
+was restored once more, with a new form of Army organisation, which
+substituted “Departmental Legions” in the place of regiments. As in
+the year before, it was notified that all Eagles were to be sent to
+the Artillery dépôt at Vincennes for destruction there, according to
+law--the metal of the Eagles to be melted down, their silken tricolor
+flags to be burned.
+
+The date of the final disbandment was fixed for September 30, and in
+almost every case there was a pathetic scene when the hour came for the
+soldiers to take their last farewell of their Eagles. “On the day of
+the disbandment,” describes one officer, speaking of his own regiment,
+“we all paraded, and the roll was called for the last time. Then the
+Eagle was passed solemnly down along the line, the band playing a
+funeral march. The officers and soldiers, all in tears, after saluting
+it, embraced and kissed the Eagle. It was then escorted back to the
+colonel’s quarters to be packed up in a box and forwarded, according to
+the official instructions, by carrier to the Ministry of War, thence to
+go to Vincennes.”
+
+[Illustration: LA REVUE DES MORTS.
+
+From a picture by R. Demoraine.]
+
+[Sidenote: ON THE DAY OF THE LAST PARADE]
+
+In a few cases, where the senior officers knew that they had nothing
+to hope for in the way of consideration from the new _régime_, the
+Eagles were publicly broken up at the last parade by the colonels
+themselves, with a blacksmith’s hammer or pioneer’s hatchet, and the
+silken tricolor flags cut to pieces, after which the metal fragments,
+together with the shreds of the flags, were distributed as keepsakes
+among officers and men. That being done, all silently dispersed, never
+to reassemble. In some other cases, as had happened a twelvemonth
+previously, the Eagles disappeared before the last parade--the officers
+in the various regiments having arranged for one of themselves to
+retain the Eagle of the corps privately, either by agreement or after
+drawing lots.
+
+It was in this way that what Napoleonic Eagles and flags are now at the
+Invalides came to be there. They were kept hidden by their possessors
+until after the Revolution of July, 1830, and then, on the formation
+of the present collection of standards and trophies being officially
+sanctioned, most of those at present exhibited were brought to light
+and presented, either by those who had been treasuring them in secret,
+or by their heirs and families.
+
+Three Waterloo Eagles are at the Invalides: those of the 2nd Grenadiers
+of the Guard, and of the 25th and 26th of the Line; these last two
+of the regiments in the columns charged by the Scots Greys and the
+Royals. In addition to the Eagles, there are at the Invalides several
+standards that saw service on the battlefield under Napoleon and
+survived the vicissitudes of war: seven flags of infantry, and as
+many of artillery, one cuirassier standard, and five other cavalry
+standards. Most of these originally bore Eagles on their staves, but
+those Eagles are now wanting.[47]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                               FOOTNOTES
+
+
+[1] “The Eagle for each standard,” said Napoleon, going into details
+with Berthier, “must be made ‘strong and light’--‘_Il convient de la
+rendre à la fois solide et légère._’” “An Eagle looking to its left,
+with wings half expanded, and with its talons grasping a thunderbolt,
+as in the old Roman standard,” was the approved design: the bird
+measuring eight inches from head to feet, and in the spread of its
+wings from tip to tip, nine and a half inches. Below the thunderbolt,
+as base and support, was a tablet of brass, three inches square;
+bearing in raised figures the number of the regiment. The weight of the
+whole--the Eagle was to be of copper, gilded over--was just three and
+a half pounds avoirdupois, and a stout oaken staff was provided, eight
+feet long and painted _bleu impérial_, to which the silken regimental
+colour was attached; the flag being thirty-five inches along the staff
+and thirty-three lengthwise, in the fly.
+
+[2] The drawings made and laid before Napoleon at Saint-Cloud are in
+existence, preserved among the archives of the Ministry of War in Paris.
+
+[3] All armies, as a fact, owe to Napoleon the introduction of the
+practice of inscribing on the colours of a regiment the names of
+battles in which that regiment has won honour; nowadays an essential
+feature of the war-flags of all nations. It originated after Napoleon’s
+first campaign as General Bonaparte, at the head of the Army of Italy;
+and, together with the inscriptions of quotations of passages from his
+despatches, was introduced by him as a device to aid in developing
+military spirit and a sense of _esprit de corps_ among the soldiers.
+The Directory promptly censured the innovating young general for acting
+without having first referred the matter to Paris. They sent orders
+that all such inscriptions were to be forthwith deleted from the
+flags. Napoleon, however, refused to obey; and the regiments of his
+Army supported him. One and all protested against the removal of their
+titles to fame, the first appearance of which on their flags had been
+hailed with enthusiasm. In the result the Directory deemed it advisable
+to accept the situation; and after that, in turn, the flags of the
+regiments of the other Republican armies elsewhere were authorised to
+display similar decorations of their own. The practice in due course
+was adopted in the other armies of Europe.
+
+[4] The sending of an invitation to the Pope had been finally decided
+on in July, after a series of protracted discussions in the Imperial
+Council of State.
+
+[5] One of the Eagles so presented by Napoleon on that afternoon is
+now at Madrid. It is a trophy that is absolutely unique. Upwards of
+a hundred and thirty of Napoleon’s Eagles, the spoils of war, now
+decorate cathedrals, chapels, and arsenals in the capitals of Europe;
+but there is only one French naval Eagle now in existence, the trophy
+at Madrid; the Eagle of a line-of-battleship named the _Atlas_.
+
+Every French line-of-battleship was represented on the Champ de Mars
+and received its Eagle. “Tous les vaisseaux,” to quote the words of
+M. Le Brun, in his _Guerres Maritimes de France_, “étaient gratifiés
+d’une aigle et d’un drapeau à leur nom, donnés par l’Empereur à son
+couronnement, ou avaient assisté et prêté serment des députations du
+port et de l’Armée Navale; chaque vaisseau avait envoyé sa députation
+composée de trois officiers, trois officiers mariners, et quatre
+gabiers ou matelots.”
+
+The Eagle of the _Atlas_ was received on the Field of Mars by the
+ship’s deputation of three officers, three warrant officers, and four
+seamen, sent from Toulon, where the _Atlas_ then was in harbour with
+Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet, which Nelson was watching. The _Atlas_
+crossed the Atlantic in the Toulon fleet with Nelson in pursuit,
+returned to Europe, fought in the indecisive battle off Cape Finisterre
+in July 1805, and was so shattered in the fight, in which the ship only
+just escaped capture, that she was left behind for repairs at Ferrol
+when Villeneuve put to sea finally, to meet his fate at Trafalgar. The
+_Atlas_ had to remain there and fell into the hands of the Spaniards in
+1808, at the time of the national uprising against Napoleon. Thus the
+naval Eagle passed into Spanish possession.
+
+The crew of the _Atlas_ were taken by surprise, while the ship was in
+dock at Ferrol, by the Spanish regiment of Navarre in garrison there
+when the news of the Rising of May 2 at Madrid reached Galicia. They
+were trapped and pounced down upon. The ship was seized by a sudden
+assault, the officers and men being made prisoners to the provincial
+Junta, before they had a chance of concealing or making away with their
+Eagle.
+
+In other cases elsewhere, undoubtedly, the naval Eagles were somehow
+disposed of surreptitiously. It is very remarkable that not a single
+French naval Eagle came into British hands on board the thirty odd
+ships of the line which we captured between 1805 and 1814 during the
+war with Napoleon. At Trafalgar, according to a French officer on
+board the French flagship, the _Bucentaure_, they had one. Describing
+the approach of the _Victory_, at the outset of the battle, says the
+officer: “A collision appeared inevitable. At that moment Villeneuve
+seized the Eagle of the _Bucentaure_ and displayed it to the sailors
+who surrounded him. ‘My friends,’ he called out, ‘I am going to throw
+this on board the English ship! We will go and fetch it back or die!’
+(‘Mes amis, je vais la jetter à bord du vaisseau Anglais! Nous irons
+la reprendre ou mourir!’) Our seamen responded to these noble words by
+their acclamations.” Admiral Villeneuve, all the same, did not throw
+any Eagle on board the _Victory_; nor was one found in the _Bucentaure_
+during the forty-eight hours that the ship was in our possession after
+the battle, previous to her wreck in the storm at the entrance to Cadiz
+harbour. None too were found on board any of Nelson’s other prizes.
+As to that, also, what was done with, or became of, the Eagles of the
+five battalions serving as marines in the French fleet at Trafalgar,
+officers and men of which were taken prisoners by us--those of the 2nd
+of the Line, the 16th, 67th, 70th, and 79th?
+
+At the Field of Mars all eyes were on the six hundred and fifty
+officers and men of the Naval Brigade as they marched round the arena
+to receive their Eagles. Soldiers everybody was familiar with. There
+was nothing particular about them which had not been seen before. But
+a French sailor was not often seen away from his port; and to Paris
+man-of-war’s men were things quite new and strange. And, besides, were
+they not “nos braves marins,” who were going to clear the way for the
+“Invasion Flotilla” and the “Army of England”; to strike the blow that
+should sweep from the path of the Emperor “ce terrible Nelson!” One
+and all gazed in wonder at the sailors: the captains in their long,
+swallow-tailed blue coatees barred with gold lace, white breeches, and
+high top-boots; the sprightly “_aspirants_,” or midshipmen, in cut-away
+jackets and little round hats with turned-up brims; the showy “Marins
+de la Garde,” wearing broad-topped shakos edged with yellow braid,
+over which tall red tufts nodded, red-cuffed and yellow-braided blue
+jackets, and blue trousers striped with yellow; the other sailors of
+the fleet in massed squads, in shiny black flat-brimmed hats, blue
+jackets studded with brass buttons, red waistcoats, red, white, and
+blue striped pantaloons, wide in the leg, “a l’Anglaise,” and shoes
+with round steel buckles. Such a sight the good people of Paris had
+never witnessed before, and they gazed at it rapturously with all their
+eyes, and shouted their loudest “Vive la Marine!”
+
+There was too, in addition to the sailors, one Eagle deputation
+the strange appearance of which attracted special curiosity and
+interest that afternoon. Everybody gazed in wonder at a group of
+strapping-looking foreigners of all ages who marched along by
+themselves, got up as light infantrymen, with green tufted shakos and
+bright green uniforms. They belonged to one of the Emperor’s newest
+creations; and were the Eagle escort of Napoleon’s “Irish Legion.” They
+had come to the Field of Mars to receive the only Eagle that Napoleon
+ever gave to a foreign regiment in his service, with a flag designed
+specially for them, of “Irish Green,” as it was described, of silk,
+fringed with gold cord, inscribed on one side in letters on gold:
+“Napoléon, Empereur des Français, à la Legion Irlandaise,” and bearing
+on the other a golden harp, uncrowned, and the words “L’Indépendance
+d’Irlande.” Two ex-patriated men of good Irish family, refugees escaped
+from the penalty of treason under English law for their part in the
+Rising of ’98, seven years before, headed the deputation; a Captain
+Tennant and a Captain William Corbet. In the ranks of the regiment
+the deputation represented marched other Irish refugees, who had shed
+English blood at Wexford and Enniscorthy; fugitives from political
+justice before that who had had a part in the attempted raids of Hoche
+and Humbert; “Wild Geese” who had made their flight overseas after the
+fiasco of 1803; and a sprinkling of French-born Irish, some of whom had
+worn the red coat of the old Irish Brigade in the Royal Army of France,
+grandsons of the men of Fontenoy. Napoleon had enrolled his Irish
+Legion just a twelvemonth before, in view of a descent on Ireland from
+Brest simultaneously with the crossing of the Straits of Dover from
+Boulogne. At the request of those who first came forward to enlist, he
+had uniformed the corps in the “national” green, in place of the former
+red coat which had been the historic colour of the old French-Irish
+regiments ever since James the Second, under the Treaty of Limerick,
+carried over to France the remains of the army that had fought for him
+at the Boyne. The Eagle the Irish Legion received on the Field of Mars
+faced Wellington in Spain, and narrowly escaped falling into Blücher’s
+hands in Germany in 1813. It was hidden away after Fontainebleau,
+and reappeared during the “Hundred Days,” finally to disappear after
+Waterloo.
+
+[6] Pigtails, too, were missing; for the first time at a military
+display of the kind in Paris. Even the soldiers of the Revolution,
+the rank and file, had kept up the old style of clubbed-hair. The new
+_régime_, however, had altered all that. “Le petit tondu” (“The little
+shorn one”), a camp-fire nickname for Napoleon, from his close-cropped
+head, had made every soldier cut his hair short; by a general order
+of six months before. The order, it may be mentioned incidentally, at
+first nearly raised a riot in the Imperial Guard, and led to a number
+of duels between “les canichons,” the “lap-dogs” or “poodles,” as
+the men who obeyed the order at the outset were sneeringly dubbed by
+comrades who refused to do so, and the others.
+
+[7] Ney rode up to head the 6th Light Infantry at the outset,
+immediately after a chaffing challenge to Murat. The two, who had been
+operating together during the previous days, had had some difference
+over their methods of attack. Said Murat arrogantly on one occasion,
+after Ney had been laboriously trying to get into his brother-marshal’s
+head an elaborate scheme of his proposed tactics: “I don’t follow your
+plans. It is my way not to make mine till I am facing the enemy!”
+Ney, on the morning of Elchingen, got his chance to pay Murat back.
+They were together, riding close to Napoleon, with all the staff near
+by, and not far from the Danube bank. As the guns began to open, Ney
+suddenly turned and laid hold of Murat’s arm. Giving his colleague a
+rough shake, before the Emperor and everybody, Ney exclaimed: “Now,
+Prince, come on! Come along with me! and make your plans in the face
+of the enemy!” The astonished Murat drew himself back, whereupon
+Ney spurred up his horse and dashed forward; “galloping off to the
+river-bank, he plunged into the water up to his horse’s belly amidst a
+shower of cannon-balls and grape, to direct the mending of the bridge.”
+That done, he galloped on to head the leading column of attack across
+the bridge.
+
+[8] Napoleon himself, it so chanced at the outset, heard the fierce
+cannonading from afar, and, becoming suddenly alarmed at what might be
+happening, was thrown into a fever of anxiety over it; into a state of
+violent agitation. It was on the evening of November 11. Napoleon just
+then was on his way to take up his quarters at the Abbey of St. Polten,
+whence only a few miles intervened between him and Vienna. As he was
+nearing St. Polten he was suddenly alarmed by “the smothered, distant
+echo of heavy firing, which was not even interrupted by night.” So one
+of the aides de camp on the Emperor’s staff, De Ségur, describes. “What
+unforeseen danger could suddenly have overtaken Mortier? It was almost
+certainly he who, going forward with an advanced guard of five thousand
+men, had unexpectedly come across Kutusoff with forty thousand. It was
+impossible, though, at first, to imagine the destruction of the marshal
+and his unhappy division.”
+
+At St. Polten they listened, and in the end feared for the worst.
+
+“One could only offer up prayers and await the decision of fate! The
+wide and deep Danube separated us from the marshal. This stream had
+just delivered over to the enemy one of Mortier’s generals, who in
+despair had tried to make his escape in a boat. Everything announced a
+catastrophe: the Emperor no longer doubted it. In his anxiety, as he
+drew nearer to the sound of the combat, while advancing from Moelkt
+to St. Polten, the fear of a reverse usurped the place of Napoleon’s
+former confidence of victory. Now, his agitation increasing with the
+noise of the firing, he despatched everybody for news: officers, aides
+de camp; every officer who happened to be near him. With his mind
+full of Mortier’s peril he suspended the progress of the invasion.
+He stopped Bernadotte and the flotilla behind at Moelkt. He recalled
+Murat, dashing on for the gates of Vienna; and Soult, following Murat.
+Not indeed until three on the next afternoon, the 12th of November,
+was Napoleon’s anxiety allayed by the arrival of an aide de camp from
+Mortier.”
+
+[9] It was to one of these retreating columns that the historic “Ice
+Disaster” happened. Every one knows the story, as related in Napoleon’s
+Austerlitz Bulletin, and mentioned also by Ségur, Marbot, and Lejeune
+in their memoirs, how a column from the Russian left wing tried to
+escape over the frozen surface of the lake of Satschan, how Napoleon
+turned a battery on them while in the act of crossing the ice and
+broke it, and how “thousands of Russians, with their horses, guns,
+and waggons, were seen slowly settling down into the depths.” The
+actual facts are recorded in the recently discovered report of the
+“Fischmeister” (or overseer) of the Carp Fishery of Satschan Lake,
+setting forth the results of draining off the water in the spring
+of 1806. There were found at the bottom, recorded the Fischmeister,
+twenty-eight cannon, one hundred and fifty dead horses, but only three
+human corpses. The column, it would appear, had been composed of five
+batteries of artillery, and when the ice was broken, the guns, all but
+the two nearest the shore, sank through and dragged the horses with
+them to the bottom; but the gunners, it would seem, were all able to
+scramble out, except the three unfortunates who had been either hit by
+French round-shot, or were entangled in the harness of their teams. The
+loss of human life was therefore, presumably, only three men out of the
+five hundred or so who must have been riding on, or with, the guns.
+
+[10] Incidentally, that Christmas Day morning of the Schönbrunn review
+has an interest for us in this country. Napoleon left the palace for
+the review in a vile temper, which no doubt was one reason why he
+vented his spleen so savagely on the unfortunate soldiers of the 4th
+in his speech of censure. This was probably the prime cause. Late on
+the night before, on Christmas Eve, a courier from Paris had arrived at
+the Imperial head-quarters, bringing the defeated Admiral Villeneuve’s
+Trafalgar despatch, his “Compte Rendu,” written while Villeneuve was a
+prisoner on his way to England, and dated from “A bord de la frégate
+Anglaise _Euryalus_--le 15me Novembre 1805.” It had been sent to France
+under a flag of truce, as an act of international courtesy, and the
+Minister of Marine forwarded it to Napoleon. The news of the disaster
+had reached the Emperor some five weeks before, at Znaim in Moravia, a
+fortnight before Austerlitz; first, from some Austrian officers taken
+prisoners by Augereau in the Tyrol, then from the English papers. It
+had been enough then to give him a bad night, and make him morose for a
+week. Now that he learned the story from his own admiral, it made him
+more furious than ever. The original despatch received by Napoleon at
+Schönbrunn that Christmas Eve exists, with its pathetic closing appeal,
+the pitiless response to which sent Admiral Villeneuve to a suicide’s
+grave. “Profondément pénétré,” it ran, as written by Villeneuve’s own
+hand, “de toute l’etendue de mon malheur et de toute la responsibilité
+que comporte un aussi grand désastre, je ne désire rien tant que d’être
+bientôt à même d’aller mettre aux pieds de S.M. ou la justification
+de ma conduite ou la victime qui doit être immolée, non a l’honneur
+du pavillon, qui, j’ose le dire, est demeuré intact, mais aux manes
+de ceaux qui auroient péri par mon imprudence, mon inconsidération ou
+l’oubli de quelqu’un de mes devoirs.”
+
+[11] The spectacles which Marshal Davout wore at Auerstadt--an
+extremely primitive-looking pair of goggles in thick-rimmed
+frames--were picked up on the field, and are treasured to this day by
+the family of the present Duc d’Auerstadt.
+
+[12] Gudin’s division was officially returned as having lost 124
+officers and 3,500 men.
+
+[13] Davout’s cocked hat, with one end shot away and a bullet-hole
+through the crown, is now one of the battle relics of Napoleon’s wars
+kept at the Invalides.
+
+[14] In his instructions to Ney in regard to the trophies taken,
+Napoleon wrote this, specially with reference to a number of flags
+belonging to Prussian regiments elsewhere which had been temporarily
+stored at Magdeburg: “Les drapeaux prussiens pris dans l’arsenal de
+Magdeburg ne signifient rien: donnez l’ordre qu’ils soient brûlés, mais
+vous ferez porter en triomphe par votre premier division les drapeaux
+pris à la garnison, pour être remis par vous à Berlin à l’Empereur. On
+ne doit porter en triomphe que les drapeaux pris les armes à la main,
+et brûler ceux pris dans les arsenaux.”
+
+[15] The _Moniteur_ made this notification in addition: “The Emperor
+has ordered a series of eight pictures, sixteen feet by ten, each,
+with life-size figures, from MM. Gérard, Lethière, Gautherot, Guérin,
+Hennequin, Girodet, Meynier, and Gros. The pictures are intended for
+the galleries of the Tuileries, and will depict the most memorable
+events of the campaign in Germany.” They are now in the Louvre, badly
+“skied,” and only paid heed to by the batches of recruits who from
+time to time are conducted round to see them under the guidance of
+under-officer instructors as lecturers.
+
+[16] The hat that Napoleon wore at Eylau is kept in the little crypt
+beside Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides. It is the identical one
+represented in the colossal picture of the battle by Gros, to be seen
+at the Louvre, and was given to Gros for the picture. At the second
+Funeral of Napoleon in 1840, it figured beside the coffin, with the
+Emperor’s decorations and the sword Napoleon wore at Austerlitz.
+
+[17] A gallant young officer of the Guard was the first man to break
+through the Russian line in front. With half a dozen grenadiers he made
+a dash forward, just as the chasseurs made their attack. Captain Ernest
+Auzoni--that was the young officer’s name--caught sight of a Russian
+flag a few paces from him, and, calling on the men of his company, led
+straight at it, cutting his way through. “Courage!” he shouted. “Brave
+comrades! Follow me!” Auzoni, describes Caulaincourt, “rushed forward
+sword in hand, followed by his company, and penetrated the compact
+centre of the Russian column: his sudden assault broke their ranks, and
+our grenadiers burst in through the passage opened to them by the brave
+Auzoni.”
+
+Napoleon, from his post near at hand, was also an eye-witness of the
+captain’s daring. On the Russians falling back after the routing of the
+column, as the Guard were re-forming for a fresh advance, he summoned
+Auzoni and the men of his company before him. “Captain Auzoni,” began
+Napoleon as they stood in front of him, “you well deserve the honour
+of commanding my ‘veteran’ _vieux moustaches_; you have most nobly
+distinguished yourself. You have won an officer’s cross and an annuity
+of two thousand francs. You were made captain at the beginning of the
+campaign, and I hope you will return to Paris with still higher rank.
+A man who earns his honours on the field of battle stands very high in
+my estimation!” Turning then to the soldiers, Napoleon added: “I award
+ten crosses to your company!” With an enthusiastic cheer the company
+marched off to rejoin their comrades, and as Caulaincourt puts it, “the
+same men advanced to meet the enemy’s fire with a degree of courage and
+enthusiasm which is impossible to describe.”
+
+The brave young Guardsman captain, though, did not see Paris again.
+Auzoni met his fate at Eylau. He fell later in the day, in another
+charge, in which he took a second Russian flag. Napoleon himself
+discovered him, lying at the last gasp among the mortally wounded
+on the field. It was next day, as Napoleon, in accordance with his
+invariable practice, was riding over the scene of the battle.
+
+“Near a battery which had been abandoned by the enemy,” to use again
+the words of Caulaincourt, “about 150 or 200 French grenadiers were
+lying dead, surrounded by four times their number of Russians. They
+were lying weltering in a river of blood, amid broken gun-carriages,
+muskets, swords, and other _débris_. They had plainly fought with the
+most determined fury, for every corpse showed numerous and horrible
+wounds. A feeble cry of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ was heard as we rode up.
+It came from the middle of this mountain of dead, and all eyes were
+turned instantly to the spot whence the voice proceeded. Half concealed
+beneath a tattered flag lay a young officer whose breast was decorated
+with an order. He was still alive, and, though covered with many
+wounds, as we stopped by him he managed to raise himself so as to rest
+on his elbow. But his handsome face was overcast with the livid hue of
+death. He recognised the Emperor, and, in a feeble, faltering voice,
+exclaimed: ‘God bless your Majesty! Farewell, farewell! Oh, my poor
+mother!’ He turned a look of supplication towards the Emperor, and with
+that, with the words on his lips, ‘To my country, to dear France--my
+last thoughts!’ he fell back dead.
+
+“Napoleon seemed riveted to the spot. ‘Brave men!’ he exclaimed. ‘Brave
+Auzoni! Noble young fellow! Ah, this is a frightful scene! The annuity
+shall go to his mother: let the order be presented for my signature
+as soon as possible!’ Then, turning to Surgeon Ivan, who accompanied
+him, he said: ‘Examine poor Auzoni’s wounds and see what can be done
+for him!’ Nothing however, could be done: the brave youth was beyond
+medical aid.”
+
+[18] The Old Guard was recruited from the _élite_ of the Line. After
+every battle soldiers who had been particularly prominent in the
+fighting were specially transferred to the Old Guard; a form of
+advancement much coveted among the rank and file. At all times there
+was great competition to enter the Guard, and every regimental colonel
+kept “waiting lists,” in anticipation of vacancies, on which names
+were sometimes down for years. Service in the Old Guard meant, in
+addition to the prestige of enrolment in so favoured a corps, life amid
+the gaieties and pleasures of Paris, with increased pay and personal
+privileges; and the highly estimated honour of a special weekly
+inspection by the Emperor himself in the Courtyard of the Carrousel, at
+which Napoleon invariably walked in and out among the ranks, talking to
+the men; and any Guardsman who had a grievance might then personally
+lay it before the Emperor. The private in the Guard drew seven sous a
+day as compared with the one sou pay of the private of the Line. Off
+duty, the private of the Guard ranked on an equality with a sergeant of
+the Line, and in army social circles was entitled to be addressed by
+the Linesmen he met as “Monsieur.”
+
+Only men of unblemished record were qualified for admission to the
+Old Guard. A colonel of a Line regiment on one occasion sent a man
+into the Guard who turned out a _mauvais sujet_. Napoleon ordered the
+unfortunate colonel to be publicly reprimanded on parade, and confined
+to his quarters for three days; and further had his name and offence
+put in General Army Orders, issued for universal circulation from
+the War Office, and posted up at the head-quarters of every regiment
+throughout the service.
+
+[19] Baron Lejeune, on the Imperial staff at Wagram, who was clever
+with his pencil, was specially desired by Napoleon to design the
+costume for the Eagle-Guard, as he himself relates. “Anxious to confer
+distinction on those brave fellows who had taken part in the actual
+defence of the flag, the Eagle of their regiment, Napoleon conceived
+the idea of giving them a costume and equipment which should mark
+them out as specially honoured, and at the same time be suitable to
+the duties they had to perform. The Emperor therefore sent for me and
+asked me to make a sketch of a costume such as he wished to give to
+what he called his ‘Eagle-Guard,’ or those non-commissioned officers
+whose office it was to surround and defend the actual standard-bearers.
+The chief weapons of each were to be a pistol, a sword, and a lance,
+so that in the heat of the battle they would never have to trouble
+themselves about loading a gun. There was to be gold on their
+epaulettes, sword-belts, and helmets. I made a drawing and took it
+to the Emperor, and he sent it to the Minister of War with his own
+instructions on the subject.”
+
+[20] Colonel Lejeune was again called in to design the decoration for
+the Order, and has recorded what Napoleon said to him. “‘The Order of
+the Golden Fleece,’ he said, ‘is typical of victory; my Eagles have
+triumphed over the Golden Fleeces of the King of Spain and the Emperors
+of Germany, so I mean to create for the French Empire an Imperial Order
+of the Three Golden Fleeces. The sign of this order shall be my own
+Eagle with outspread wings, holding in each of its talons one of the
+ancient Golden Fleeces it has carried off; whilst hanging from its
+beak it will proudly display the Fleece I now institute.’ He then took
+a pen and roughly marked out the size I was to make my drawing.... I
+made the drawings as desired, and he issued the order accordingly. The
+institution of the new Order was duly announced in the _Moniteur_;
+but the terms of the treaty of peace compelled him to suppress a
+distinction the chief aim of which had been to humiliate the conquered
+countries of Spain and Austria.”
+
+[21] They were to be merely identifying tokens. “If by misfortune,”
+Napoleon went so far as to say, “fanions should fall into the enemy’s
+hands, it will be apparent from their plain appearance that their
+capture is a matter of no account.” “Une affaire sans conséquence” were
+Napoleon’s words.
+
+[22] It was during the battle at Ratisbon that Napoleon, according
+to the story, was wounded for the only time in his life, and had to
+dismount, and, in the sight of the dismayed soldiers, have his wound
+dressed by a surgeon, the news causing consternation through the ranks
+of the whole army far and wide. Indeed, only this year there was
+placed in the Army Museum at the Invalides, as an historic relic of
+the highest interest, “the fragment of a shell that struck Napoleon at
+Ratisbon on the 23rd of April, 1809, and gave him the only wound he
+ever received in battle.” The truth is revealed in M. Combes’ journal,
+which, after telling how Napoleon carefully concealed everything
+which might detract from his reputation among his soldiers for
+invulnerability, enumerates his wounds in detail. After his death half
+a dozen scars were found on his body. There was the mark of a wound on
+his head, a hole above his left knee, either from a bayonet or a lance,
+the mark of the injury received at Ratisbon, another on one hand, and
+on the body the scars of sword cuts and slashes.
+
+[23] As to this last trophy, it was unfortunate from our point of
+view--since Fate willed that the 5th of the Line should lose its
+colours to an enemy--that one of the original Battalion Eagles of the
+corps had previously, in accordance with Napoleon’s order of 1808, been
+returned to Paris. The half-winged Eagle of the 5th would have made
+a notable trophy for Chelsea Hospital. While heading an attack on an
+Austrian field-work in Masséna’s battle at Caldiero on the Venetian
+frontier in November 1805, the Eagle was smashed from its staff by a
+grape-shot and dashed violently to the ground, with one wing shattered.
+At the same time the battalion recoiled before the terrific fire with
+which its charge was met. The Eagle saved the honour of the corps.
+Picking its battered remains up and waving it at arm’s-length above his
+head, with a shout of “Come on, comrades! follow the Eagle,” one of
+the officers rushed with it through the _mêlée_ to the front and led
+the forlorn-hope onset that stormed the post. After that, the Eagle,
+lashed to the stump of its broken pole, went through the battle to the
+end, doing its part in rallying the battalion round it, to keep at
+bay greatly superior numbers of the enemy until relief arrived. There
+had been almost a mutiny in the 5th in 1808 when they were ordered to
+return their battle-scarred ensign to the Invalides, but the order was
+obeyed. Otherwise the half-winged Eagle would have been at Chelsea now.
+
+[24] The present imitation Eagle at Chelsea was specially cast in brass
+from a mould of one of other trophies; one of the Eagles of the 82nd
+being used as the model. The imitation wreath was made from a sketch
+by an old officer of the Hospital staff. The Eagle and wreath were
+specially reproduced in order that the Barrosa Eagle trophy should be
+represented among the Peninsular and Waterloo Eagles displayed together
+at the head of the catafalque on the occasion of the lying-in-state at
+Chelsea of the remains of the Duke of Wellington, seven months after
+the theft. The dummy is in the Chapel at Chelsea now, with a brass
+tablet beneath it notifying that it is not the original Eagle, set
+up where the Barrosa Eagle used to be, in front of the organ-loft.
+The existing staff, however, is genuine. It is the Eagle-pole that
+the thief threw away in his fright; the staff actually borne by the
+Porte-Aigle of Napoleon’s 8th of the Line under fire at Austerlitz and
+Friedland; the identical staff inclined in salute with the Eagle to
+Napoleon on the throne on the Day of the Eagles on the Field of Mars.
+
+[25] In a letter from an officer of the 87th, published in the London
+papers, it is stated that the regiment also captured the Eagle of the
+French 47th, but “the man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it
+away, from excessive fatigue and a wound. We had been under arms for
+thirty-two hours before the action began.”
+
+[26] The successor to the 8th of the Line of the Grand Army in the
+Army of the Third Napoleon was, in its turn, no less unfortunate than
+its predecessor. The Eagle of the 8th of the Line of the Army of the
+Second Empire is now at Potsdam, one of the spoils of the war of
+1870–1. It was carried through the streets of Berlin in the triumphal
+parade of the Prussian troops on their return home after the war, and
+after that, was deposited over the vault of Frederick the Great in the
+Church at Potsdam in the presence of the old Kaiser Wilhelm, Moltke,
+Von Roon, and other leaders of the victorious host. It bears these
+“battle-honours,” inscribed on its silken flag, among them “Talavera”:
+
+                              “AUSTERLITZ
+                                 1805.
+                               FRIEDLAND
+                                 1807.
+                                TALAVERA
+                                 1809.
+                                 ANVERS
+                                 1832.
+                                ZAATCHA
+                                 1849.
+                               SOLFERINO
+                                 1859.”
+
+
+[27] Southey, in his _History of the Peninsular War_, makes this ugly
+suggestion in regard to the Eagle trophies of Salamanca: “It is said
+that more than _ten_ were captured, but that there were men base enough
+to conceal them and sell them to persons in Salamanca who deemed it
+good policy, as well as a profitable speculation, to purchase them
+for the French.” It may be, as to that, that Marmont’s army lost more
+than the two Eagles now at Chelsea. It is of course possible that
+camp followers and Spanish peasants of the locality, wandering over
+the battlefield to strip and plunder the dead on the day after the
+battle, when Wellington and the army were miles away, picked up Eagles
+on the scene of so tremendous a disaster for the French. They might
+easily traffic in them with French agents at Salamanca, well aware of
+their value if they could be secretly restored to their regiments. It
+is, however, inconceivable that British soldiers could have acted as
+alleged and been guilty of the dastardly crime that Southey hints at.
+Four Eagle-poles, with screw tops and the Eagles gone, were found on
+the field by British burying-parties; but those were all, and one of
+the four may have been the pole of the Eagle of the 62nd.
+
+[28] As to Napoleon’s opinion in regard to the preservation of trophies
+so acquired, see his memo to Ney at Magdeburg, quoted in Chapter V., as
+footnote to page 141.
+
+[29] Napoleon had given permission to his marshals in Spain to grant
+colonels of regiments, in certain circumstances, discretionary
+powers as to the disposal of their Eagles. Colonels were authorised,
+when their regiments were proceeding on what might be considered
+“exceptionally hazardous service,” or when operating in difficult
+country, to keep the Eagles back, and leave them in camp or in a
+fortress. That is how Wellington in 1812 came to find the Eagles of the
+13th and 51st of the Line at Madrid.
+
+[30] On July 28, 1813, in a skirmish in the Pyrenees, the 40th (now the
+2nd Somersetshire Regiment) surrounded and captured the French 32nd of
+the Line, rounding its First Battalion up in a valley and charging it
+with the bayonet, 24 officers and 700 men being taken. The Eagle had
+been thrown into a rapid mountain torrent in sight of our men, during
+the retreat of the 32nd, but it was impossible to prevent it, or to
+recover the Eagle afterwards.
+
+[31] Others of the Eagles had narrow escapes during the Peninsular
+War. In the fighting south of the Douro, near Grijon, on the day
+before Wellington’s passage of the river at Oporto, the 31st Light
+Infantry all but lost their Eagle on being charged by the British
+14th and 20th Light Dragoons. The 31st broke in confusion before the
+British onset, and only rallied some miles from the battlefield. “Our
+losses,” described one of the officers, “were very heavy, but our
+Eagle, which had been in extreme peril in the encounter, was happily
+saved.” Again, in the pursuit up the mountain side after the defeat of
+Girard’s Division at Arroyo dos Molinos, the Eagles of the 34th and
+40th of the Line escaped capture--although both regiments were all but
+annihilated--to Marshal Soult’s expressed relief. In reporting the
+reverse to Napoleon, Soult added this by way of solatium: “L’honneur
+des armes est sauvé; les Aigles ne sont pas tombés au pouvoir de
+l’ennemi.” After Talavera, the Eagle of the 25th of the Line was picked
+up on the battlefield by a party of the King’s German Legion--it was
+sent to Hanover and is now in Berlin; also, during the battle, the
+British 29th took two Eagle-poles in a charge, but with the Eagles
+unscrewed from the tops and removed by the Eagle-bearers at the last
+moment and carried out of the fight under their coats.
+
+[32] Elsewhere are other permanent trophies of the campaign, spoils
+of another kind. Nine hundred and twenty-nine of Napoleon’s cannon
+fell into Russian hands, mostly abandoned during the retreat, without
+attempt at defence. Of these, most are fittingly kept at Moscow; they
+number 875, and are exhibited in the arsenal, or mounted as trophies in
+the public squares in the Holy City. As with the flags, they are not
+all French. Those bearing the French Imperial cypher, the letter “N”
+surmounted by the Eagle and Napoleonic crown, number less than a half
+of the total. The French guns number 365; the bulk of the collection
+being made up of artillery from allied and vassal states: 189 Austrian
+cannon, 123 Prussian, 70 Italian, 40 Neapolitan, 34 Bavarian, 22 Dutch,
+12 Saxon, 8 Spanish, 5 Polish, with 7 Westphalian, Würtemburg, and
+Hanoverian pieces. The Prussian and Austrian guns, most of them, it is
+fair to say, were not captured from the contingents serving with the
+Grand Army in Russia: they formed part of the artillery marching with
+Napoleon’s main column; they belonged to the French army, and were
+manned by French gunners, being spoils from the Austerlitz, Wagram,
+and Jena campaigns, turned to account to form field batteries for the
+French army. Innumerable other reminders of the fate of the Grand
+Army are preserved all over Russia: soldiers’ arms and accoutrements,
+personal belongings and decorations of French officers and men,
+fragments of uniforms, helmets, swords and lances, pistols and muskets;
+relics mostly picked up on battlefields or by the wayside along the
+route of the retreat. The muskets serve to illustrate incidentally,
+in the variety of the woods used for their stocks, the makeshifts to
+which, some time before 1812, the demands of Napoleon’s armaments had
+reduced France: the musket-stocks of oak, chestnut, elm, beech, maple,
+of even poplar and deal, tell a tale of exhausted supplies of the
+walnut and ash woods ordinarily used in the manufacture of firearms.
+
+The total of 75 Eagles and other standards is no extravagantly
+large array of trophies, remembering the overwhelming nature of the
+catastrophe to the Grand Army in Russia. Of the 600,000 soldiers
+who mustered round their regimental colours at the crossing of the
+Niemen at the outset of the campaign, 125,000 were killed in fight,
+and 193,048, according to the Russian official returns, were taken
+prisoners. In round numbers 250,000 died on the line of march during
+the retreat, from cold, hardships, and starvation, or were killed as
+stragglers by the Cossacks and peasants. The mementoes also of their
+grim fate exist to-day in Russia. The graves of most of them may be
+seen all along the railway line from Wilna to Moscow, which follows
+closely the route of Napoleon and the Grand Army, over country the same
+in appearance now as then; a dreary, wind-swept, lonesome plain, broken
+only by vast stretches of dark, monotonous birch and pine forests, with
+here and there narrow ravines, and strips of hilly ground, amid which
+wind chill and sluggish rivers. At intervals huge mounds, looking like
+embankments or ancient barrows of enormous size, rise over the flat
+expanse of plain. They are the graves of the French dead. It took three
+months to destroy the remains of the dead soldiers and of some 150,000
+horses which perished in the campaign. The ghastly task was carried out
+locally by the peasantry, under an urgent Government order, so as to
+prevent the outbreak of pestilence in the spring from the vast numbers
+of unburied corpses that strewed the track of the ill-fated host. The
+bodies, when the snow thawed, were dragged together and collected in
+heaps each “half a verst long and two fathoms high,” over 500 yards
+long and some 14 feet high. At first, efforts were made to burn them,
+but the supply of firewood failed, and the stench all over the country
+was unbearable. The corpses were then hauled into shallow trenches
+alongside, and quicklime and earth heaped over them, making the mounds
+now to be seen along the railway, on either side of the old post-road
+from Wilna to Moscow, the route of Napoleon’s retreat. In the province
+of Moscow, 50,000 dead soldiers and 29,000 dead horses were so disposed
+of before the middle of February; in the province of Smolensk, by
+the end of the month, 72,000 dead soldiers and 52,000 horses; in the
+province of Minsk, 40,000 human corpses and 28,000 horses; to which,
+later on, when the ice had melted, 12,000 more dead soldiers were
+added, the bodies found in the Beresina; in the province of Wilna, also
+by the end of February, 73,000 dead soldiers, with 10,000 dead horses.
+There were, in addition, very many never accounted for: dead stragglers
+who had perished in the forests, their remains being devoured by the
+wolves; and those who were massacred--beaten to death, or buried alive,
+or burned alive--by the peasants in places away from the line of march.
+Such was the appalling loss of life that attended the Moscow campaign,
+and which the trophies represent. In the circumstances, in proportion,
+the toll is hardly a large one.
+
+[33] The wolves killed many of the stragglers as they wandered in
+search of food or shelter from the cold, away from the retreating
+columns. They followed in the track of the Grand Army to the last,
+across Germany to the Rhine. It is the fact, indeed, that the presence
+of wolves to-day in the forest lands of Central Europe is largely due
+to the tremendous incursion of ravenous brutes from Russia which swept
+in huge swarms in rear of Napoleon’s ill-fated host.
+
+[34] Coignet, then a lieutenant of the Old Guard, thus speaks of the
+horrors of those latter days immediately following the Beresina: “The
+cold continued to grow more intense; the horses in the bivouacs died
+of hunger and cold. Every day some were left where we had passed the
+night. The roads were like glass. The horses fell down, and could not
+get up. Our worn-out soldiers no longer had strength to carry their
+arms. The barrels of their guns were so cold that they stuck to their
+hands. It was twenty-eight degrees below zero. But the Guard gave up
+their knapsacks and guns only with their lives. In order to save our
+lives, we had to eat the horses that fell upon the ice. The soldiers
+opened the skin with their knives, and took out the entrails, which
+they roasted on the coals, if they had time to make a fire; and, if
+not, they ate them raw. They devoured the horses before they died. I
+also ate this food as long as the horses lasted. As far as Wilna we
+travelled by short stages with the Emperor. His whole staff marched
+along the sides of the road. The men of the demoralised army marched
+along like prisoners, without arms and without knapsacks. There was no
+longer any discipline or any human feeling for one another. Each man
+looked out for himself. Every sentiment of humanity was extinguished.
+No one would have reached out his hand to his father; and that can
+easily be understood. For he who stooped down to help his fellow would
+not be able to rise again. We had to march right on, making faces to
+prevent our noses and ears from freezing. The men became insensible to
+every human feeling. No one even murmured against our misfortunes. The
+men fell, frozen stiff, all along the road. If, by chance, any of them
+came upon a bivouac of other unfortunate creatures who were thawing
+themselves, the newcomers pitilessly pushed them aside, and took
+possession of their fire. The poor creatures would then lie down to die
+upon the snow. One must have seen these horrors in order to believe
+them.... But it was at Wilna that we suffered most. The weather was so
+severe that the men could no longer endure it: even the ravens froze.”
+
+[35] One of those who presented arms before Napoleon at the Rheims
+review died, just twenty years ago, as the last French survivor of
+Trafalgar--André Manuel Cartigny. At Trafalgar he had been a powder-boy
+on board the celebrated _Redoutable_, from the mizen-top of which the
+bullet was fired which killed Nelson. He paraded at Rheims among the
+remnant of survivors of Napoleon’s last battalion left of the Seamen of
+the Guard, and was present a month later at the historic farewell at
+Fontainebleau.
+
+[36] General Dupont, an officer of the highest promise and with an
+exceptionally brilliant record, Ney’s right-hand man, and chief
+divisional leader on many battlefields, a special favourite also with
+Napoleon (“a man I loved and was rearing up to be a marshal,” were
+Napoleon’s words of him), while on the expedition which was to win him
+the bâton, at the head of 25,000 men, let himself be surrounded and
+cut off; trapped among the gorges of the Sierra Morena by a horde of
+peasants backed up by Spanish regulars; and then, in spite of a final
+chance that offered for him to force his way through, surrendered to
+the enemy. He had committed “_une chose sans exculpe; une lacheté
+insultante_,” declared Napoleon in savage fury on hearing of the
+surrender. Those who had had part in it, declared the Emperor, should
+“die on the scaffold”--“ils porteront sur l’échaffaud la peine de
+ce grand crime national!” He had Brigadier Legendre, Dupont’s Chief
+of the Staff, who had been released on parole, brought before him
+at Valladolid, and heaped on the wretched, broken man the bitterest
+reproaches and revilings; beside himself in his wrath. Not a word in
+reply, in explanation, would he listen to. Before the Imperial Guard on
+parade, and the assembled Imperial Staff, Napoleon finally gripped the
+general by the wrist and shook it passionately. An onlooker, another
+officer, describes the scene: “A nervous contraction of the muscles
+seemed to seize the Emperor. ‘What, General!’ he ejaculated, his voice
+quivering with fury. ‘Why did not your hand wither when it signed that
+infamous capitulation!’” Legendre was cashiered: Dupont (who had been
+ill and was wounded during the battle) was cashiered, degraded from the
+Legion of Honour, and kept under police _surveillance_ as long as the
+Empire lasted.
+
+What became of the other two Eagles, those of the “Garde de Paris” and
+of the Second Battalion of the 5th Light Infantry, and the fourteen
+Reserve Battalion flags that were taken at Bailen is unknown. They
+are not in Spain, although one trophy indirectly associated with the
+disaster is now at Madrid, the admiral’s flag of Admiral Rosily, who
+was at Cadiz with the French squadron which Dupont was marching to
+rescue. It is kept as a trophy in the Museo Naval of Madrid. Rosily had
+charge of the five French ships of the line which escaped into Cadiz
+after Trafalgar. When Spain rose against Napoleon, they were placed in
+danger from the garrison of Cadiz; being at the same time unable to put
+to sea because a British fleet blockaded the port. Dupont’s army was
+specially sent to bring away the 4,000 soldiers and sailors on board,
+who were then to abandon the ships. Just before Dupont reached Bailen,
+the Spaniards attacked Rosily, bombarding his ships with heavy cannon,
+and mortars and a gunboat flotilla, and he had to surrender, his
+admiral’s flag being carried off by the Spaniards, ultimately to find
+its way to its present resting-place.
+
+[37] Years later these trophies were again brought to light, and by
+degrees, one at a time, or two or three together, found their way once
+more to the Hôtel, where they form part of the present collection.
+Among those now in the Invalides are six of Frederick the Great’s
+trophies annexed at Berlin by Napoleon in 1806; six Austrian and
+Bavarian flags, also of the Seven Years’ War period, removed by
+Napoleon from Vienna; an old German flag taken by Marshal Turenne, and
+in earlier times hung in Notre Dame; five Austrian colours of unknown
+origin; one Russian flag-trophy from Austerlitz; one Prussian standard
+from Jena; and a number of Spanish and Portuguese flags from the
+Peninsular War.
+
+Three British regimental flags, originally captured by Napoleon’s
+Polish lancers at Albuera, found their way back in this manner to
+the Invalides. They were taken at Albuera in the first part of the
+battle, when, under cover of mist and rain squalls, the French cavalry,
+circling round one flank, swooped down on the leading British brigade
+before its regiments could form in square. Of the five other British
+flags at present in the Invalides, four were taken on March 8, 1814,
+just three weeks before the burning of the trophies, and had not yet
+reached Paris. They were taken from us in very tragic circumstances--at
+the disastrous attempt to storm the fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom; but the
+details of that painful story nor the identification of the flags do
+not concern us here. One of the four flags is kept beside Napoleon’s
+tomb. The fifth flag purports to have been a British sloop-of-war’s red
+ensign and to have been captured in the Baltic in December 1813, in an
+action of which the British Admiralty has no record, and the French
+account is only a tradition. It again, apparently, had not reached
+Paris by March 1814.
+
+[38] To the Army, Louis XVIII. was only a King imposed on them by their
+enemies; by the triumphant enemies of France, the European Coalition.
+He was merely the “_protégé_ of foreign bayonets,” placed over them
+by the English and Prussians; “l’émigré rentré en croupe derrière un
+cosaque!” To the soldiers he only personified defeat and disaster; and
+the memories that they gloried in had been of set purpose obliterated
+by him and his creatures. The very charter under which he had assumed
+authority was dated the 19th year of his reign, as though Napoleon had
+never been. He had proscribed their Eagle standards before which all
+Europe had trembled. By his ordinances he had abolished and insulted
+the memory of their victories. In addition he had disbanded and turned
+adrift their officers, and had left them to starve, without the pay
+that was their due, in wretchedness and rags.
+
+Fuel was added to the fires of disaffection in the ranks by the tales
+that went round of every barrack-room of personal ill-usage of and
+affronts to officers who had won the respect of all on campaign, and
+before the enemy under fire. _Ci-devant_ colonels and captains in
+long-forgotten corps of the old-time Royal Army were appointed at one
+stride Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals on the Active List,
+ousting and sending into unemployment men, whom Napoleon himself had
+picked out for command, whose names were household words to the Army.
+In almost every regiment officers who had grown grey in war-service
+before the enemy, who had won distinction on a hundred battlefields,
+were shelved; set aside for _émigrés_, who, a quarter of a century
+before, had been boy subalterns in the army of the _ancien régime_, and
+had not set foot in France since they fled the country at the outbreak
+of the Revolution. These were brought back and posted wholesale as
+colonels and _chefs de bataillon_ all through the Army, superseding
+and driving into poverty veterans who had raised themselves to their
+ranks and positions through personal merit and war-service, and had
+qualified step by step in the different grades. At a _levée_ one day,
+after a review before the Duc de Berri, a grey-headed old regimental
+officer stepped forward, according to custom, and made a request to
+have granted to him for his services the Cross of St. Louis. “What have
+you done to deserve it?” was the Prince’s reply, uttered in a cold and
+sneering tone. “I have served in the Army of France for twenty years,
+your Royal Highness!” “Twenty years of robbery!” was the cruel and
+insolent answer as the Duc de Berri turned his back on the veteran. The
+words were repeated everywhere among the soldiers and had the worst
+effect. Another tale that caused deep resentment throughout the Army
+was that of the treatment which Marshal Ney had received at Court when
+protesting against rudeness which had been shown by certain ladies of
+title to his wife one day at the Tuileries. They had openly insulted
+the Maréchale Ney by making sarcastic and contemptuous comments on her
+comparatively lowly birth. Marshal Ney personally complained to the
+King, but was coldly referred to the Court Chamberlain. He laid his
+complaint before that functionary and was personally rebuffed “in a
+harsh and insolent manner”--as the only reply to which the Marshal with
+his wife had withdrawn from Paris altogether. And more than one other
+officer of eminence, it was told, had in like manner been forced to
+cease attendance at Court. When the moment came for the reappearance of
+Napoleon in their midst, the Army was more than ready to receive their
+old leader with open arms and rally once more to the Eagles.
+
+[39] It was the action of Marshal Ney that sealed the fate of the
+Bourbon _régime_.
+
+Ney had accepted the Restoration as bringing peace to exhausted France;
+he had given in his allegiance to the Bourbons. Angry and sick at heart
+as he was over the ill-treatment meted out to his brother officers,
+and the humiliations that the new _régime_ had inflicted on the Army,
+and sore over personal grievances of his own, he had, in spite of
+all, loyally held back from intriguing against the restored dynasty.
+Napoleon’s leaving Elba, when he first heard the news, he condemned
+outspokenly as a crime against France. Impulsive and headstrong by
+nature, he forgot his grievances, and hastened to Paris to offer his
+sword to the King. Napoleon, he said to the King at the interview at
+the Tuileries, which was immediately granted him, was a madman and
+deserved to be brought to Paris “like a bandit in an iron cage.” So
+hostile witnesses at Ney’s court-martial declared, though Ney himself
+emphatically denied using any words of the kind. His services were
+accepted gladly, for Ney was the most popular of all the marshals
+with the soldiers, and he was sent to lead the army against Napoleon.
+Besançon was proposed as his head-quarters, and he betook himself there.
+
+Almost at once, however, anxieties and doubts beset Ney. On taking
+up his command he found but few regiments available. He was promised
+reinforcements, but none arrived, and while he waited, no news of the
+rapidly altering situation reached him from Paris. Meanwhile the news
+came steadily in from all sides that the soldiers could not be trusted
+to oppose Napoleon. Ney was still loyal to the Bourbons, and he moved
+his troops nearer the line of advance Napoleon was taking; to Lons le
+Saulnier, midway between Besançon and Lyons. To officers who hinted
+that the soldiers would not fight if Napoleon appeared, Ney answered
+angrily: “They _shall_ fight. I will take a musket and begin the firing
+myself! I will run my sword through the first man who hesitates!”
+
+But events were moving too fast: the tide of Bonapartism was rising
+visibly on all sides. Napoleon, Ney heard, was being received
+everywhere with acclamation; the soldiers were said to be declaring
+for him by thousands. Already in every garrison the soldiers were
+displaying their old Eagle cap-badges and tricolor cockades. “Every
+soldier in the Army,” relates Savary in his Memoirs, “had preserved
+his tricolor cockade and the Eagle-badge of his shako or cap. It
+was needless for any order to be given for their resumption; that
+had been done on the first intelligence of the Emperor’s landing in
+France.” Everywhere too, officers who had kept back and hidden the
+old regimental Eagles and tricolor standards, were bringing them out
+openly. In regiments where the Ministerial order had been obeyed and
+the Eagles sent to Paris for destruction, the soldiers now took out the
+Bourbon arms from the white flags, substituting a tricolor shield for
+the royal shield with the three fleurs-de-lis.
+
+Ney next began to doubt what line of conduct he ought to adopt. On
+one side was his oath of allegiance to the King. On the other was the
+prospect of a civil war which would be ruinous to France, which he, at
+the head of his army, had it in his power to prevent. It became borne
+in on him as his duty to the country in the circumstances to throw his
+influence on the side of his old comrades and Napoleon. His personal
+grievances against the Bourbons rankled in his mind, and self-interest
+urged him to go with the stream; but it was rather a sense of duty
+and patriotism, to avert a civil war, that impelled Ney to take the
+action that he did. His final decision was influenced by an insidiously
+worded letter from Napoleon, playing on Ney’s personal feelings and
+calling him by his old name of “the Bravest of the Brave.” The letter
+was brought to him by two secret emissaries on the night of March 13,
+who urged on the marshal that his soldiers were about to abandon him,
+and that it was impossible for him single-handed to hope to stem the
+current of national feeling. That and the letter turned the scale. Ney
+decided to abandon the cause of the Bourbons.
+
+Assembling his troops on parade next day, he publicly declared for
+Napoleon in a fiery proclamation addressed to the Army. “Officers,
+under-officers, and soldiers,” Ney began, reading out the proclamation
+from on horseback in front of the assembled battalions, “the cause
+of the Bourbons is lost for ever! The dynasty adopted by the French
+nation is about to reascend the throne. To the Emperor Napoleon, our
+Sovereign, alone belongs the right of reigning in our dear country.”
+The proclamation concluded with these words: “Soldiers, I have often
+led you to victory. I will now conduct you to that immortal phalanx
+which the Emperor Napoleon is leading towards Paris. It will arrive
+there within a few days, when our hopes and our happiness will be for
+ever realised. Long live the Emperor!”
+
+The declaration came as fire to a train of gunpowder. Ney had hardly
+uttered a dozen words before frantic exclamations and shouts burst
+forth; shakos and caps and helmets were raised and waved on muskets and
+swords, amid tumultuous cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” “Vive le Maréchal
+Ney!” The men broke their ranks and rushed headlong round Ney, catching
+hold of him and kissing his hands and feet and uniform: “those not near
+enough kissing his embarrassed aides de camp.” Shouted some: “We knew
+you would not leave us in the hands of the _émigrés_!” The marshal at
+the close was escorted back to his quarters amid a crowd of excited
+soldiers cheering frantically.
+
+The scene there was very different. Arrived in his quarters, Ney
+found himself at once surrounded by a group of anxious and nervous
+staff-officers and aides de camp. Said some: “You should have informed
+us of it before, M. le Maréchal! We ought not to have been made
+witnesses of such a spectacle!” One or two officers protested and
+resigned on the spot. One aide de camp, indeed, a former _émigré_,
+broke his sword in two and flung the pieces at Ney’s feet. “It is
+easier,” he exclaimed passionately, “for a man of honour to break iron
+than to break his word.”
+
+“You are children,” was the marshal’s answer. “It is necessary to do
+one thing or the other. What would you have me do? Can I stop the
+advancing sea with my hands? Can I go and hide like a coward to avoid
+the responsibility of events I cannot alter? Marshal Ney cannot take
+refuge in the dark! There is but one way to deal with the evil--to take
+one side and avert civil war. So we shall get into our hands the man
+who has returned, and prevent his committing further follies. I am not
+going over to a man, but to my country.”
+
+[40] The silken standard flags attached below the Eagles were plainer
+in design than the flags of 1804 and 1808. They were of the ordinary
+pattern of the national banner, three vertical bands of colour, edged
+with golden fringe. Lettered in gold on the white central band of the
+flag was the Imperial dedication, worded similarly to the inscription
+on the older flags, and on the reverse the names of the battles in
+which the corps had taken part--“Austerlitz,” “Jena,” etc.
+
+[41] Napoleon left Paris for the front on the early morning of June 12,
+after spending several hours in his cabinet, issuing orders and making
+arrangements for the carrying on of the Government in his absence.
+Caulaincourt, acting for the time being as Foreign Minister, was with
+Napoleon until the last moment, and witnessed his departure. “The
+clock struck three, and daylight was beginning to appear. ‘Farewell,
+Caulaincourt!’ said the Emperor, holding out his hand to me, ‘Farewell!
+We must conquer or die!’ With hurried steps he passed through the
+apartments, his mind being evidently fully taken up with melancholy
+thoughts. On reaching the foot of the staircase, he cast a lingering
+look round him, and then threw himself into his carriage and drove
+away.”
+
+[42] Trafalgar, on the French side, it may be added by the way, had a
+distinguished representative at Waterloo in the person of the officer
+at the head of the Artillery of the Imperial Guard, General Drouot.
+He had fought against Nelson as a major of artillery doing duty in
+the French fleet. His ship was one of the few that escaped into Cadiz
+after the battle, whence he was recalled to join the Grand Army in the
+Jena campaign. Drouot was the officer who, during the retreat from
+Moscow--where he brought the artillery of the Guard through without
+losing a gun--“washed his face and shaved in the open air, affixing
+his looking-glass to a gun-carriage, every day, regardless of the
+thermometer!”
+
+[43] Napoleon--it may be of general interest to add--passed the
+whole of the day, between the review in the forenoon and late in the
+afternoon when he rode forward to witness the Guard start for the last
+charge, on the ridge of high ground near Rossomme, So the memoirs of
+the officers of his staff unanimously record. At no time was he near
+the so-called “observatory,” in regard to which there has recently been
+a controversy, based on the publication of a letter by the eminent
+surgeon, Sir Charles Bell, who was at Waterloo, and rendered very
+valuable service to the wounded. This is the story as told in his
+letter by Dr. Bell:
+
+“About half a mile of ascent brought us to the position of Bonaparte.
+This is the highest ground in the Pays Bas. I climbed up one of the
+pillars of the scaffolding, as I was wont to do after birds’ nests....
+We got a ladder from the farm-court; it reached near the first
+platform. I mounted and climbed with some difficulty; none of the rest
+would venture.... The view was magnificent. I was only one-third up the
+machine, yet it was a giddy height. Here Bonaparte stood surveying the
+field.
+
+“This position of Bonaparte is most excellent; the machine had been
+placed by the side of the road, but he ordered it to be shifted. The
+shifting of this scaffolding shows sufficiently the power of confidence
+and the resolution of the man. It is about sixty feet in height. I
+climbed upon it about four times the length of my body, by exact
+measurement, and this was only the first stage. I was filled with
+admiration for a man of his habit of life who could stand perched on a
+height of sixty-five feet above everything, and contemplate, see, and
+manage such a scene.”
+
+Mention of the scaffold-platform is also made by Sir Walter Scott, who
+rode over the field in August 1815. Sir Walter gives this version, in a
+letter to the Duke of Buccleuch:
+
+“The story of his (Napoleon’s) having an observatory erected for him
+is a mistake. There is such a thing, and he repaired to it during
+the action; but it was built or erected some months before, for the
+purpose of a trigonometrical survey of the country, by the King of the
+Netherlands.”
+
+Thomas Kelly, an enterprising London publisher, went further. He had a
+picture of the erection drawn, and brought it out as a popular print
+in October 1815, under the title of “Bonaparte’s Observatory to view
+the Battle of Waterloo.” The print shows a three-tiered structure,
+apparently quite lately constructed, with three platforms, and ladders
+leading from one platform to the other. Napoleon himself is depicted
+on top, his spy-glass at his eye, and with two staff officers in
+attendance.
+
+There certainly was a structure of the kind on the field. Such a thing,
+in a dilapidated condition, is to be seen in miniature on the Siborne
+model of the battlefield at the Royal United Service Institution. It
+is made to scale, and in its essential features bears out Dr. Bell’s
+description. It stands close to the “wood of Callois” by the Nivelle
+road, rather more than a mile to the south of Hougoumont. It has only
+one platform, whence it would overlook the trees and give a good view
+of the battle.
+
+On the other hand, in addition to the silence of all Napoleon’s
+officers on the subject, we have this plain statement from Frances Lady
+Shelley, an intimate friend of the Duke of Wellington, who was in Paris
+during the occupation after the battle and was also taken over the
+battlefield by the Duke of Richmond some three months after Waterloo.
+It appears in her recently published Diary, at p. 173, and may be taken
+as settling the fate of the story of “this towering and massive perch,”
+“that wonderful scaffold,” “that huge scaffolding,” “part of Napoleon’s
+equipment at Waterloo,” as a modern historical writer calls it.
+
+This is what Lady Shelley wrote at the time:
+
+“Throughout the battle of Waterloo Napoleon remained on a mound, within
+cannon shot, but beyond the range of musketry fire. He certainly was
+not in the observatory after the battle began; nor could he have from
+that spot directed the movements of his troops. That observatory was
+built for topographical reasons by a former Governor of the Netherlands
+something like a century ago.”
+
+[44] The “fanion” of the second battalion of the 45th shared the fate
+of the regimental Eagle. It fell to Private Wheeler of the 28th, the
+“Slashers,” the present 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
+The 28th, on the left of Picton’s line, had, like the Highlanders,
+charged forward among the French, following close after the Greys.
+Wheeler, after a fierce fight with the bearer of the “fanion,” in which
+he was severely wounded, bayoneted the French sergeant and carried off
+the trophy. It disappeared in an unexplained manner some days later,
+during Wellington’s march on Paris, while being forwarded to the Duke’s
+head-quarters.
+
+[45] The news of Waterloo reached Paris just twenty-four hours earlier
+than it reached London--during the night of Tuesday, June 20. How it
+was broken to the French capital forms a story little less dramatic
+than the other story of how the news of Waterloo arrived in London. In
+Paris they had had news of the successful opening of the campaign. On
+the 18th, just as Napoleon was holding his last review, before Waterloo
+opened, the “triumphal battery” of the Invalides was firing a _feu
+de joie_ in honour of victory over Blücher at Ligny. On Monday and
+Tuesday, the 19th and 20th, Napoleon’s Ligny Bulletin, with details,
+was published in the _Moniteur_. When the cafés closed that evening,
+there was as yet no word of Waterloo. But at that same moment the news
+was arriving--in a private message to Carnot, the Minister of the
+Interior. What had happened leaked out first at his house.
+
+“On that evening,” describes M. Edgar Quinet, “several persons were
+assembled at the house of M. Carnot, and they vainly asked him for
+news. To evade these importunate questions, Carnot went to a card-table
+and sat down with three of his friends. He from whom I have this story
+sat opposite the Minister. By chance he raised his eyes and looked at
+Carnot; he saw his countenance, serious, furrowed, with tears pouring
+down it. The cards were thrown up; the players rose. ‘The battle is
+lost!’ exclaimed Carnot, who could contain himself no longer.” The news
+spread through Paris like wild-fire. It was not believed at first; the
+catastrophe was too stunning, too terrible. To that succeeded a gloomy
+stupor (une morne stupeur).
+
+“They had not long to wait. All was known next morning. The astounding
+news of the rout of the army in Belgium, and the still more astounding
+news of the arrival of Napoleon in Paris, were spread through the great
+city almost simultaneously, and stirred to the depths its restless and
+volatile population. Twice before had Napoleon suddenly returned to
+Paris--from Moscow, from Leipsic--and each time alone, without an army.
+Thus had he again presented himself.”
+
+[46] The Campaign of the Hundred Days, it has been estimated, from
+first to last cost Napoleon in round numbers, in killed, wounded, and
+prisoners taken in the field:
+
+  Ligny (Killed and wounded)           10,000
+  Quatre-Bras (Killed and wounded)      4,300
+  Waterloo (Killed and wounded)        29,500
+  Waterloo (Prisoners unwounded)        7,500
+  Wavre (Killed and wounded)            1,800
+  Lesser actions (Killed and wounded)   2,100
+                                       ------
+                               Total   55,200
+                                       ======
+
+Out of the 126,000 men with whom Napoleon took the field, he lost some
+43 per cent. of his army in the week between June 15 and 22.
+
+[47] Five Eagles were on show in London in the autumn of 1815, in
+the so-called “Waterloo Museum,” having been acquired somehow on the
+occupation of Paris. Two were described as the Eagles of the 5th of
+the Line and of the Seamen of the Guard, and two as National Guard
+Eagles--all four having been presented at the _Champ de Mai_. The fifth
+purported to be the Eagle of the “Elba Guard.” None of the five had
+ever been in action.
+
+
+
+
+                                 INDEX
+
+
+  Alexander, Czar of Russia, 96, 104, 109, 111, 275, 292, 318, 324, 326
+
+  Aspern, Battle of, 204–10;
+    Eagle buried on the battlefield, 204;
+    two Eagles lost at, 205;
+    at bay in the burning village, 207;
+    Napoleon demands to see both Eagle and colonel, 208
+
+  Auerstadt, Battle of, 127, 133–6;
+    Davout under fire at, 134–5;
+    Eagles under fire at, 135;
+    Napoleon and the Third Corps, 136
+
+  Augereau, Marshal, 37, 145, 155, 156, 157, 158, 164, 169;
+    wounded at Eylau, 158;
+    sends Marbot to save a regiment, 179;
+    in disgrace, 364
+
+  Austerlitz, Eagles in the battle:
+    Eagle of the 15th Light Infantry rescued by the Commandant, 101;
+    Eagle of the 111th rallies the regiment, 102;
+    Eagle of the 108th in peril, 103;
+    Eagle of the 10th Light Infantry rescued, 106;
+    Eagle of the 24th Light Infantry lost, 108;
+    fate of Eagle of 4th, 108–10;
+    Eagle of the Chasseurs of the Guard saved by a dog, 112, 113;
+    trophies sent to Notre Dame, 120–121;
+    trophies disappear in 1814, 342
+
+
+  Barrosa, Battle of, trophy stolen from Chelsea Hospital, 227–8;
+    Colonel Vigo-Roussillon’s narrative, 229–31;
+    how the 87th advanced, 229;
+    fighting with their fists, 231;
+    French colonel and General Graham, 230;
+    French account of taking of “Eagle with Golden Wreath,” 232–3;
+    as reported in the _Moniteur_, 233;
+    Napoleon refuses to replace lost Eagle, 234;
+    the “Aiglers,” 235
+
+  Battalion Eagles, abolished, 183, 187–8;
+    Napoleon’s anger at the Amsterdam review, 188;
+    some supplied surreptitiously, 188;
+    final orders issued, 189
+
+  “Battle-honours,” as first authorised by Napoleon, 14, 15;
+    adopted in other armies, 14;
+    only selected names allowed, 191;
+    on the flag of the Old Guard, 315;
+    abolished at the Restoration, 350
+
+  Beauharnais, Eugène, Viceroy of Italy, 29, 204, 275, 88
+
+  Berlin, insolence of Prussian officers, 124;
+    their fate, 146;
+    Napoleon’s triumphant entry, 144–6;
+    in the uniform of a French general, 145;
+    demeanour of the citizens, 145;
+    French soldiers in the streets, 143;
+    march through, of Davout’s corps, 143–4;
+    parade of captured Prussian flags in, 144;
+    deputation of Senate carries trophies to Paris, 147
+
+  Bernadotte, Marshal, 38, 98, 112, 139, 144, 151, 152, 295, 364;
+    surprised at Möhringen, 150
+
+  Berthier, Marshal, chief of the general staff of Grand Army, 10, 11,
+        39, 40, 41, 125, 145, 188, 194, 195, 288, 296, 322, 323, 364;
+    on campaign with Napoleon, 39–41;
+    at an Eagle presentation, 194
+
+  Bessières, Marshal, 29, 38, 110, 111, 177, 364
+
+  Borodino, in the battle, 269–72;
+    Eagles have several narrow escapes, 270–2;
+    soldier’s personal narrative, 270
+
+  Boulogne Camp, 10, 15, 19, 58, 61
+
+  British trophies, destroyed at the Invalides, 333–5;
+    naval flags among them, 335;
+    the trophies now there, 344
+
+  Brune, Marshal, 34, 39, 363
+
+
+  Caesar, Eagle of, adopted by Napoleon, 9, 10
+
+  Cambronne, General, 355, 60
+
+  Campaign of 1813, fate of Eagles in: at the battles of the Katzbach,
+        Dennewitz, Kulm, Grossbeeren, 298;
+    Irish Legion saves its Eagles, 294–5;
+    heroic feat of a soldier, 295–6;
+    a short-sighted colonel, 297;
+    the Eagle of the 17th escapes, 297–302;
+    one lost in first day’s fighting at Leipsic, 303;
+    Eagles buried or flung into the Elster, 304–305;
+    dashing rescue by young officer, 306;
+    Eagles after the capitulation of Dresden, 306–307;
+    Eagle lost in a river in Eastern France, 307–8;
+    “One against eight,” 308
+
+  Caulaincourt, 169, 172, 173, 305, 322, 323, 373, 374
+
+  “_Champ de Mai_,” 1815, 362–72;
+    distribution of Eagles to the Last Army at, 369–72;
+    why so called, 362;
+    varying opinions on effect of, 372
+
+  Champ de Mars, presentation of Eagles on, 15, 16, 20–1, 22–3, 43–59;
+    personages who were there, 28–9, 31, 32, 35–42;
+    taking the oath, 46–7;
+    the final contretemps, 56–7
+
+  Chapel Royal, Whitehall, reception of Wellington’s trophies in, 226,
+        242, 430–1
+
+  Charlemagne, Eagle and Insignia of, 8, 9, 27, 44
+
+  Chasseur Eagles ordered to be withdrawn, 182
+
+  Chasseurs, 4th, deputation to Napoleon, 31
+
+  Chasseurs of the Guard, 25, 111, 416–20
+
+  Chelsea Hospital, trophies, 214, 227, 243, 255;
+    Barrosa trophy stolen, 227–8
+
+  Clark-Kennedy, Sir A. K., takes an Eagle at Waterloo, personal
+        narrative, 399, 401, 402, 403
+
+  Cock proposed as National Emblem, Napoleon objects to it, 3, 4, 6
+
+  “Cou-cous,” barrack-room nickname for the Eagles, 53;
+    adventure of one at Jena, 133
+
+  Cüstrin, surrender of fortress, 126, 142
+
+
+  Danube flotilla in Austerlitz campaign, 82–3
+
+  Davout, Marshal, 19, 29, 42, 98, 100, 101, 103, 4, 14, 34, 35, 36,
+        143, 145, 166, 167, 267, 268, 269, 275, 363, 369
+
+  Decoration of “Trois Toisons d’Or” proposed for Eagles, 186
+
+  De Coster, Napoleon’s Waterloo guide, 377, 386, 397
+
+  D’Erlon, General Drouet, at Waterloo, 381, 382, 384, 388, 392
+
+  Disbandment of the Grand Army, Eagles at, 434–5
+
+  Donzelot, General, at Waterloo, 391, 392, 410
+
+  Dragoon Eagles ordered to be withdrawn, 182
+
+  Dresden, surrender of, 1813, fate of the Eagles at, 307, 348–349
+
+  Dupont, General, 64, 65, 66, 82, 83, 86–91, 93, 94, 106, 135;
+    surrender of Bailen, fate of, 336, 7, 338;
+    Minister of War at the Restoration, harsh conduct of, 349, 350
+
+  Dürrenstein, combat at: Napoleon’s alarm on hearing sudden cannonade,
+        81–2;
+    forlorn-hope charge of the 100th and 103rd to save the Eagles, 89;
+    heroism of Marshal Mortier at, 90;
+    Eagles of the 9th and 32nd taken and retaken, 91;
+    just saved at the last, 93
+
+  Durutte, General, at Waterloo, 391, 410
+
+
+  Eagle lost in Masséna’s retreat found in a river in Spain and now at
+        Chelsea, 259–60;
+    of Chasseurs of the Guard at Waterloo, 415;
+    captured at Bailen recovered at Cadiz by French officer, 337
+
+  “Eagle with the Golden Wreath,” taking of, at Barrosa, 231–3;
+    fate of, at Chelsea, 227;
+    origin of the Wreath, 235, 6
+
+  “Eagle Guard,” institution of, after Eylau, 183–6;
+    why Napoleon created it, 182;
+    costume designed for Napoleon by Baron Lejeune, 185
+
+  Eagles, allowed by Napoleon to be kept back on occasions, 260;
+    ordered to be withdrawn from Spain, 261;
+    proscribed at the Restoration, 246, 350, 434–6;
+    those now at Invalides, 307–8, 435;
+    two that were taken and retaken at Waterloo, 403–4;
+    how all but two got through in the end, 420–1
+
+  “Elba Guard,” Eagle of the, 353–5
+
+  Elchingen, Ney’s heroism at, 66–8
+
+  Elephant proposed as National Emblem, 5
+
+  Ewart, Sergeant Charles, of the Scots Greys, takes an Eagle at
+        Waterloo, personal account, 396, 397, 398
+
+  Eylau Campaign, twelve Eagles lost, 166;
+    Eagle of the 9th Light Infantry lost at Möhringen and found in a
+        Russian ammunition wagon, 151–3;
+    two Eagles taken on first afternoon of Battle of Eylau, 154;
+    the 14th and 24th annihilated, and their Eagles carried off by
+        Cossacks, 155–63;
+    Marbot’s daring ride and narrow escape, 158–63;
+    10th Light Infantry and 28th also annihilated and Eagles lost, 164;
+    the 25th saves its Eagle, but loses all its officers, 165–7;
+    Eagles of the 18th and 51st taken, 166–7;
+    narrow escapes of the Eagles of the 17th and 30th, 168–9;
+    four cuirassier regiments lose their Eagles, 169;
+    Eagle of the Old Guard shot down, 172–3;
+    two more Eagles lost at Friedland, 175–6
+
+
+  “Fanions,” institution of, 183, 190;
+    ordered for all second and third and extra battalions, 183;
+    regulation colours of, 190;
+    Napoleon’s opinion of their value, 190
+
+  “First Grenadier of France,” Heart of the, narrow escapes in battle,
+        164–5, 382
+
+  Flag on the Eagle, design and details of, 10, 12–14, 191–3, 371
+
+  Flags lost under the Republic recovered in arsenal at Innsbrück, 79;
+    Marshal Ney presents on parade, 79;
+    Napoleon’s special Bulletin, 80
+
+  Fleur-de-lis proposed as National Emblem, 4, 7
+
+  Fontainebleau, Eagle of the Old Guard at, 312–14
+
+  Frederick the Great, 123, 124, 127, 134, 137, 144, 148, 149, 239,
+        292, 293, 330, 332, 336, 344;
+    his sword seized by Napoleon at Potsdam, 148, borne through the
+        streets of Paris, 149;
+    fate at the Invalides, 330, 332, 336
+
+
+  Garcia Hernandez, action at, French square broken by the Hanoverian
+        Dragoons, 255–8, 400
+
+  Gazan, General, 82, 83, 86, 92, 94, 95, 232, 233, 262
+
+  Golden Wreaths voted by Paris municipality for Eagles of Jena and
+        Friedland, 177, 235–8;
+    Napoleon orders the Austerlitz Eagles to be also decorated, 236
+
+  Gough, Major Hugh, commanding 87th at Barrosa, 222, 235
+
+  Graham, General, at Barrosa, 228, 229, 233
+
+  Grätz, combat at, special inscription, “One against ten,” placed on
+        Eagle of the 84th, 202–4
+
+  Grouchy, General, 363, 385, 389, 390, 410, 411, 421, 422
+
+  Guillemin, Porte-Aigle, of 8th of the Line, killed at Barrosa, 232
+
+  Günsburg, storming of the bridge of, in the Ulm Campaign, heroism of
+        Eagle-bearer of the 59th, 63–5
+
+
+  Halle, rearguard, action at, after Jena, 125, 136–7
+
+  Haslach, brilliant defence by Dupont, 65–6
+
+  Horse Grenadiers after Waterloo, British officer’s tribute to,
+        414–415
+
+  Horse Guards Parade, display of captured Eagles on, 217–27, 241–2,
+        429–31
+
+  Hussar Eagles ordered to be withdrawn, 182
+
+
+  Ice disaster at Austerlitz, 114–15
+
+  Invalides, on the day of the destruction of the Eagles, 30;
+    Frederick the Great’s sword and Jena trophies sent to, 148, 149;
+    destruction of trophies at, in 1814: no orders till too late, 328–9;
+    holocaust in the Court of Honour, 331–9;
+    Russian officer sent to demand an account, 339–42;
+    dome gilded by order of Napoleon from Moscow, 338;
+    attempt at salvage of trophies, 339;
+    Napoleonic trophies now at, 344, 435
+
+  Irish Legion Eagle, presented by Napoleon on the Field of Mars, 51;
+    narrow escape of coming to Chelsea, 293;
+    saved from the Prussians in 1813, 294
+
+
+  Jena Campaign, in the battle, 127–133;
+    Napoleon and the Eagle of the 64th at Jena, 129;
+    Eagle of the 76th at bay, 131;
+    Eagle pocketed by a soldier, 132–3;
+    Eagle of the 111th of the Line at Auerstadt, 135;
+    Eagle of the 32nd at Halle, 136–7;
+    Eagles paraded at the surrender of Magdeburg, 140;
+    in the triumphal march through Berlin, 144;
+    trophies paraded in Paris, 147–9;
+    half trophies recovered in 1814, 343
+
+  Jourdan, Marshal, 39, 363
+
+
+  Katzbach, incident in battle at the, colonel sacrifices his life for
+        his Eagle by mistake, 296–7
+
+  Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, Napoleonic trophies in, 150, 263–5,
+        292
+
+  Kempt, General, at Waterloo, 393, 407
+
+  Keogh, Ensign Edward, 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers, heroic attempt to
+        capture Eagle at Barrosa, 232
+
+  Kleist, General, Governor of Magdeburg, surrenders to Ney, 139, 140–1;
+    insulted by his officers, 143
+
+  Kulm, defeat of Vandamme at, 1813, Eagle of the 17th saved after
+        extraordinary adventures, personal narrative, 297–302
+
+
+  Lannes, Marshal, 37, 38, 82, 98, 113, 114, 131, 132, 137, 139, 145,
+        176, 332, 364
+
+  Last Eagle presented to a regiment, 433–4
+
+  Lefebvre-Desnouettes, General, 34, 288, 364
+
+  Legion of Honour decoration affixed to a regimental standard, 186–7
+
+  Leipsic, Battle of, fate of the Eagles cut off on right bank of the
+        Elster, 303–6
+
+  Light Infantry Eagles ordered to be withdrawn, 182
+
+  Lion proposed as National Emblem of France, 7, 8
+
+  Lobau, Count, at Waterloo, 383–384, 390, 416–17
+
+  Lübeck, Blücher’s surrender at, and spoils from, 125, 139
+
+
+  Macdonald, Marshal, at Wagram, 210, 211, 283, 293, 294, 318, 364
+
+  Mack, General, in Ulm Campaign, 61, 62, 71, 72, 82
+
+  Magdeburg, surrender of, to Marshal Ney, 125, 139–143
+
+  Mamelukes of the Guard, 24–5, 110
+
+  Marbot and the Eagle of 14th at Eylau, 158–63
+
+  Marcognet, General, at Waterloo, 391, 393, 394, 395, 397, 410
+
+  Marmont, Marshal, 75, 82, 244, 245, 246, 255, 317, 318, 319, 320,
+        323, 324, 326, 327, 328, 364
+
+  Masséna, Marshal, 35, 36, 79, 206, 209, 210, 259, 364, 415;
+    heroic defence of Aspern, 206–10
+
+  Masterton, Sergeant, 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers, captor of Eagle at
+        Barrosa, 232–3
+
+  “Mes braves Enfants de Paris,” Napoleon and 45th of the Line, 395–6
+
+  Möhringen, surprise of Bernadotte at, 150–3
+
+  Moncey, Marshal, 38, 149, 363
+
+  Morlay, Lieutenant, Eagle-bearer of the Old Guard at Eylau, 171
+
+  Mortier, Marshal, 29, 38, 81–7, 90–4, 106, 288, 317–19, 320, 324,
+        326, 363
+
+  Moscow Campaign, Russian trophies, spoils, and other mementoes of the
+        retreat, 263–266;
+    fate of Eagles at Borodino, 270–1;
+    Cuirassier regiment loses its Eagle and finds it again, 272;
+    surprise of Murat, at Vinkovo, 275;
+    at Wiasma, the only survivor of a regiment, 276–7;
+    after Wiasma, midnight ride of two officers, 282;
+    Ney orders the Eagles to be destroyed, 284;
+    at Krasnoi, loss of the Eagle of the 18th, 285;
+    concentrated near the Imperial Guard, 287;
+    at the Beresina, Eagle broken up and buried, 289;
+    after the Beresina, Eagles buried in the snow, 290
+
+  “Moustache,” dog of Chasseurs of Guard, at Austerlitz, 112–13
+
+  Murat, Prince, King of Naples, 23, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46, 57, 61, 66,
+        67, 113, 114, 125, 128, 138, 154, 169, 170, 182, 274, 283, 288,
+        352, 364
+
+
+  Napoleon: with Berthier on campaign, 40–1;
+    oration at Eagle presentations, 46;
+    at the surrender of Ulm, 70–4;
+    sees the rout of the 4th at Austerlitz, 109–10;
+    at Eylau, 158–9, 169–170, 172–4;
+    meeting Eagles on the march, 193;
+    numerous wounds of, 201;
+    forlorn-hope attempt to save Paris, 319–23;
+    during the battle at Waterloo, 386–7, 389–90, 397, 409–10;
+    witnesses the rout of the Guard, 409;
+    retreating in the square of the Old Guard, 411–14
+
+  Naval Eagle, only one now existing, 46–50
+
+  Ney, Marshal, 19, 42, 62, 63, 65–9, 71, 75, 78–9, 80, 82, 130, 131,
+        136, 139–41, 144, 150, 176, 259, 267, 276–7, 281–6, 288, 291,
+        293, 303, 318, 336, 354, 357–60, 377, 385, 389, 390–2, 406–8;
+    superintends the surrender at Ulm, 70–1;
+    defilade of garrison of Magdeburg before, 140–1;
+    heroism of, in retreat from Moscow, 281–4, 286;
+    orders his Eagles to be destroyed, 284;
+    at Waterloo, 390, 2, 406–8.
+
+
+  Officers’ guard accompanies Eagles throughout Moscow retreat, 286–7,
+        289–90
+
+  Official Eagle regulations and instructions, 11, 12, 13, 188–90, 268–9
+
+  Old Guard, full-dress uniform always carried for triumphal parades,
+        146, 273, 382;
+    Eagle of, at Eylau, 169, 171–2;
+    charge of, at Eylau, 170–1;
+    how recruited and privileges, 179–80;
+    Eagle of, recrosses the Niemen, 291;
+    existing Eagle of the Grenadiers, 314–15;
+    escort Napoleon from Waterloo, 411–415
+
+  Oudinot, Marshal, 54, 98, 112, 287, 293, 308, 318, 364
+
+
+  Pack, General, Sir Dennis, at Waterloo, 393, 407
+
+  Percy, Major the Hon. Henry (11th Light Dragoons), brings
+        Wellington’s Waterloo despatch to England, 424–5, 427–428
+
+  Petit, General, at Waterloo, 311, 312, 313, 314, 350, 412, 413, 417
+
+  Picton, General Sir Thomas, at Waterloo, 246, 389, 393, 394, 399
+
+  Pierce, Lieutenant, 66th Regiment, takes Eagle at Salamanca, 253
+
+  Polytechnic, school flag burned after surrender of Paris, 327
+
+  Pope and the Coronation, Napoleon’s first views as to presence of in
+        Paris, 3
+
+  Pratt, Ensign, 30th Regiment, takes Eagle at Salamanca, 254
+
+  Presentation of Eagles by Napoleon in the field, 194–6, 268–9, 305
+
+  Prussian army, before Jena, 123–5;
+    hopeless demoralisation of after, 125–126, 137–8, 142–3;
+    fugitives from Jena cause break-up of Auerstadt troops, 127–8
+
+  Prussian prisoners in France, Napoleon’s orders in regard to, 46, 7
+
+
+  Rapp, Colonel, of the Mamelukes, at Austerlitz, 110–11
+
+  Ratisbon, heroic fight in defence, 199;
+    Eagle of 65th buried in cellar, 197–201
+
+  Reception of the Old Guard in Paris after Friedland, 177–9
+
+  Regimental numbers abolished by the Bourbons at Restoration, feeling
+        among the soldiers, 351–2
+
+  Reille, General, at Waterloo, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 388, 410
+
+  Retiro, Madrid, two Eagles taken at surrender of, now at Chelsea,
+        259–60
+
+  Russian Cuirassiers of the Guard at Austerlitz, 108–9
+
+
+  St. Cyr, Marshal, 9, 283, 291, 302, 307, 348, 364
+
+  St. Hilaire, General, at Austerlitz and Eylau, 104, 7, 163
+
+  St. Petersburg Dragoons take two Eagles at Eylau, 153–4
+
+  Salamanca, Battle of, 243–5;
+    Wellington’s diploma victory, 243;
+    Marmont carried wounded off the field, 244;
+    charge of Heavy Cavalry at, three regiments ridden down, 250–2;
+    two Eagles taken at, 253–5
+
+  Saving of the Eagle of the Chasseurs of the Guard at Austerlitz,
+        418–20
+
+  Schönbrunn review after Austerlitz, 4th of the Line censured by
+        Napoleon at, 116–20
+
+  Serrurier, Marshal, Governor of the Invalides, 34, 328, 9, 330, 331,
+        2, 363
+
+  Smolensk, Eagles in the attack on, 267–8;
+    new regiment wins its Eagle at, 268–9
+
+  Soult, Marshal, 19, 29, 41, 42, 58, 98, 99, 100, 103, 4, 12, 13, 14,
+        16, 127, 129, 139, 155, 163, 164, 197, 337, 363, 377, 385, 386,
+        390, 414, 416
+
+  Spandau, surrender of fortress of, to squadron of hussars, 126
+
+  State procession of Napoleon to Champ de Mars for presentation of
+        Eagles, 24–30
+
+  Stettin, surrender of, 126, 138
+
+  Styles, Corporal, 1st Royal Dragoons, at Waterloo, takes charge of
+        captured Eagle, 402
+
+
+  “Temple of Victory” for the trophies of the Grand Army, Napoleon’s
+        proposals for the Madeleine as, 175
+
+  Trophies taken in the Jena Campaign, Napoleon’s disposal of, 138–9,
+        141, 144, 147–8
+
+  Trophy Eagles at Vienna, 204–5, 292
+
+  Tyrol Campaign, 1805, storming of the heights before Innsbrück by
+        Marshal Ney, Eagles signal main attack, 78–9
+
+
+  Ulm Campaign, Eagles in:
+    Eagle of 59th at Günsburg, 63;
+    Eagle of the 6th Light Infantry heads the attack at Elchingen, 67–8;
+    paraded at the surrender of Ulm for the Austrian prisoners to pass
+        before, 69;
+    humiliating march past of defeated Austrian army, 69–77;
+    trophies sent by Napoleon to Paris, 77–8
+
+
+  Vandamme, General, 104, 107, 116, 297, 298, 299, 300, 422
+
+  Victor, Marshal, 238, 287, 288, 318, 364
+
+  Vigo-Roussillon, Lieut.-Col., of the 8th of the Line, at Barrosa,
+        229, 230, 231, 233
+
+  Villeneuve, Admiral, after Trafalgar, 49, 50, 120, 382
+
+  Vincennes, Artillery Depôt of, Eagles sent to, for destruction at the
+        Restoration, 346–7, 434
+
+
+  Wagram Campaign:
+    Eagle of the 65th hidden in a cellar at Ratisbon, wrapped in
+        Austrian flags, unearthed, and presented to Napoleon, 200–1;
+    “One against ten,” the Eagle of the 84th, 202–4;
+    Eagle of the 9th buried on the battlefield at Aspern, 204;
+    Eagles of the 35th, 95th, and 106th taken, 204–5;
+    Macdonald’s column at Wagram; five regiments rally round their
+        Eagles, 212–13
+
+  Waterloo Campaign:
+    Eagles in, Napoleon’s parade of, before the battle, 380–2;
+    taking of Eagle of the 45th, 396–7;
+    two other Eagles stated to have been taken and recovered, 398–9,
+        403–5;
+    “fanion” of the 45th taken and lost while on the march, 399;
+    taking of the Eagle of the 105th, 400–3;
+    “fanion” of the 105th found at Abbotsford, 403;
+    Eagle of the 1st of the Line before Hougoumont saved by colonel,
+        405;
+    Eagles of the Guard in the last attack, 406;
+    Eagles of the 8th and 95th, 408;
+    Eagle of the Old Guard escorts Napoleon off the field, 412–14;
+    news of, in London, 426–9;
+    in Paris, 429.
+
+  Wellington, mentioned, 51, 223, 224, 8, 33, 34, 242, 243, 245, 246,
+        250, 253, 259, 260, 336, 380, 383, 384, 385, 388, 389, 390,
+        399, 400, 404, 424, 429
+
+
+_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
+predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
+were not changed.
+
+Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
+marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
+unbalanced.
+
+Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
+and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
+hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
+the corresponding illustrations.
+
+Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them,
+have been collected, sequentially renumbered, and placed at the end of
+the main text, just before the Index.
+
+Odd-page running headings appear here as Sidenotes, usually placed near
+relevant text. Some of the sidenotes refer to text in footnotes, and
+the footnotes in this eBook are at the end of the main text, not on
+their original pages.
+
+The index was not systematically checked for proper alphabetization or
+correct page references.
+
+The index often shortened page numbers in a sequence, e.g., “144, 51,
+52”. In this ebook, those page numbers have been expanded to their full
+size, e.g., “144, 151, 152”. However, it is possible that some were
+missed.
+
+Page 8: “éploye” was printed that way, without an acute accent on the
+final “e”.
+
+Page 68: “Duc D’Elchingen” was printed as “Due D’Elchingen”; changed
+here.
+
+Page 387: “A present il est fini” was printed that way, without an
+acute accent over the “e” in “present”.
+
+Page 413: “presentaient” was printed that way, without an acute accent
+over the first “e”.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75293 ***